


Syntax of Things

by Clocketpatch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Time Travel, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-21
Updated: 2009-06-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocketpatch/pseuds/Clocketpatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven, Ace and Hex go for a holiday in the jungle. Of course, these things never turn out quite as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Episode One

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to ann_blue, without whom this probably never would have been written. She proof-read the initial draft, helped me work out the plot, kicked me soundly every time I tried to give up, and emailed me her copy of the draft after I accidentally deleted it off my own computer. JJPOR, who gave me advice on Liverpool dialect. Ponygirl, who kindly gave me some back story on Hex that I wasn’t aware of. And, most of all, vvj5, who painstakingly edited the final edition of this behemoth by _printing it out and marking it with a pen_ \- all actions which will never stop making me feel humbled and amazed by the friendship and aid shown by fandom.

Episode One

 

Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars,

George Kubler, The Shape of Time

 

 

One still jungle morning, or night, depending on how you counted time, the clouds, the moon, and the monkeys were at view to a singular sight: a small wooden blue box groaning its way into existence, its colour strange against the dry green trees. Two people stepped out of the box, their gender and clothing obscured by the dark:

“…and we appear to have landed in an alien jungle, again,” said one, a man, speaking with a slight Scouse accent. “Where we will probably be the victims of attempted cannibalism, again, and you said holiday. I’m getting thick. I should know by now what ‘holiday’ means with you two.”

“Oh, Hex, quit moaning,” said the second, a woman. “You’ve only taken two steps out of the TARDIS, and so far nothing’s tried to eat you. That’s got to count for something, besides, this is Earth. It feels like Earth…” There was a pause in the conversation, an uneasy shuffling.

“Whew! What a stink!” said the woman.

“It’s an outhouse,” said the man, sounding distinctly sulky, “two steps out and there’s an outhouse. Does that bode well? Hey, what are you laughing at?”

“You,” said the woman.

“I stepped in it! You could’ve said! Ow! Earth, right, and this tree has giant spikes on it… very funny, no, stop laughing… do you hear that? It’s like… roaring…”

“Those,” said the third person to step out of the box, his rolling accent blending with the roar, and the night, and the ever-present hum of the trees, “would be the monkeys. Alouatta caraya. Completely harmless. Come along, Ace, come along, Hex. We’re on holiday.”

*

Every morning in the field, Mauss woke up early.

He wasn’t pulled out of sleep by the roaring hoots of the thirsty howler monkeys, the arrogant, unstoppable crowing of the cocks, or even the damp jungle morning coolness that left you bunched up tight into your sheets and mosquito nettings, wondering how you could be so cold when you knew that your tent was pitched well on to the equator side of the Tropic of Cancer.

Mauss woke for the jungle itself. He’d rise before the roosters every morning; before the donkey brayed for his breakfast; before the bats had gone home to roost; before the camp cooks had woke to light the fire.

He dressed by flashlight, dancing on one foot in his two-room tent, accidentally knocking over piles of research notes and hand drawn maps, all in colour-tabbed waterproof folders. He shook his pants and shoes before putting them on; not that any creepy-crawlies were likely to have breached the defences afforded by his tent’s zip and fly, but tarantulas and snakes always seemed to defeat the impossible odds, and ants —

Well, Mauss had learned long ago to respect the ingenuity, and aggression, of jungle ants.

He ducked out of his tent, zipping his door shut. The sound cut through the darkness of pre-dawn. It was 3:43 AM. He accidentally hit his rain fly with a shoulder, sending a chill dribble of collected dew into his hair, into a damp patch between his shoulder blades. He stood and stretched, listening to the ever-present buzz of insect life, and the faint gup-gulups of tree frogs.

Every morning in the field, Mauss woke up early, because from his first dig as a student he’d known that he loved the jungle, and he wanted to savour every instant of it. Especially this instant, when everyone else in the entire world was asleep and it was just him, just him and the wild until the cocks crowed, and the sun dissolved the mist, and day came. He wore a pair of loose cotton work pants and an unbuttoned linen shirt. His dark hair hung lank and unwashed over his creased brow. His chin was rough with stubble.

There was no breeze and no cloud cover, but still the far-off thunder rumbled. The stars were dagger sharp above the dark humps of the Maya mountains. The air smelled of loam, and rot, and orchid blossoms. Of livestock, and unlaundered work clothing. Later it would smell of wood smoke and coffee, and then tortillas, as Rita woke up and made her way in the kitchen. She didn’t say good morning to Mauss when she passed him on the path; there would be time for greetings later.

Mauss took a piss inside the buttress roots of an ancient ceiba tree growing along the edge of the camp site. It wasn’t the proper toilet area, and if he ever caught one of the students taking a whiz back there he’d lecture them up about respecting their hosts and blah, blah, blah. Not that José minded. He’d make a joke out of it, and then go off on some story about things he’d done as a young man before he’d been made ‘respectable’ by marriage.

Still, Mauss knew why the ancients had taken these trees as sacred. He zipped up, and leaned one hand against the trunk. Enclosed by the tall wooden walls of the curved-round roots, listening to the monkeys, and the birds, and the world wake up, Mauss could pretend that he was alone, the only human in the wilderness. He could pretend that he was in actual wilderness.

Then the sun would come, and the heat, to shatter that illusion, drawing him back to the mowed down campsite and the well run cattle-farm it branched off of. He went back to his tent to fetch his kit, and then wandered to the communal sink to do his morning resolutions.

“Morning,” said Rita as she exited the kitchen, a half-open adobe and thatch cottage. She had a bucket of slops in hand to pacify Brendan the donkey who had started making a fuss for breakfast. One of the students should have been doing that, but they’d drawn a lazy and incompetent lot for the season.

“Morning,” said Mauss, mouthing the words around his toothbrush. A bit of paste dripped out over his chin, but he cleared it off with a two-handed face splash.

“Morning,” said a student, also named Brendan — Brendan the Ass around camp. He was short, and skinny, and grey behind bottle glasses that were a fashion statement more than anything given the advances made in eye surgery over the last decade or so. He twitched back and forth behind Mauss waiting for the chance to clean his mouth and fill his water bottles.

The line up grew behind him — there were only two taps, and only one gave drinkable water; the other would give you worms at the least, and E-coli at the worst. The students, and some late rising staff, mumbled their good days to each other, their sleepy snatches of conversation, and excitement for the day ahead. They were cutting into fresh ground today; a virgin unit. No signs of looting.

Mauss shaved, with a straight blade and no mirror. He knew it inspired something like awe in his students and a few of his more junior staff members. He knew that some of the locals did the same with their machetes, and soap in place of the posh lotion he used. Kind of spoiled the macho-o jungle thing, he thought, the lotion did, but then, there was no way in hell he was braving the razor burn he’d get without. Even the locals just did the straight blade thing mostly for show, using their eight packs of cheap disposables when no one was looking.

He abandoned his tap, finally, much to the gratitude of the impatient line. They all respected him too much to say “shove off” even though he tried to test that respect every morning, see if he could break them a little.

He was sure things had never been so god-damned up-tight when he was a student, but then, that was the way the world had been getting over the past decade or so: up-tight. Even here in the jungle, or rather, what was left of the jungle. Them loggers had cut down pretty much every damn tree in the place that wasn’t on reserve land or private property, but then, Mauss couldn’t grudge them that; they were just poor men looking for a buck. Just like he was a rich, white fucker looking for mysteries and inner-peace.

Mauss sauntered to the kitchen and picked up his breakfast of black beans, tortilla, and spicy guacamole. He packed himself a lunch of the same, with the addition of two green-skinned oranges. He poured himself a huge mug of sour coffee that tasted like nectar even if there was a pair of flies taking swimming lessons in it.

His hands full juggling his plate, lunch box, mug, and his morning kit which he’d forgot to put back in his tent, Mauss made his way to the dinning area; a raised platform built around the trunk of an extraordinarily large yucca tree. A thatched roof, a high triangle deep enough to conceal a tiny ladder-loft, shaded half the platform. The yucca was just starting to flower, and its green buds gave off a sweet scent that promised an end to the dry season. The seating arrangements consisted of tipsy half-log benches. There were two hammocks on the main level spread between the yucca’s trunk and the support posts for the roof, a third in the loft. Mauss choose a bench.

He breathed deep, eating his meal, and ignoring the subdued chatter of his students as they went about the same routine. José pushed onto the bench beside him, making it wobble enough to splash what was left of Mauss’s coffee over his legs. Mauss didn’t say anything; José was the owner of the farm, a muscle-bound, if a bit plump at the waist, middle-aged man who owed his family history to sugar cane and the slave trade. He had a toddler — Jeffrey — slung over his left shoulder, and the almost-two-year made funny faces to entertain himself as his father spoke:

“Chaahk is gonna wake up today, I think; we’re all going to get wet as hell.”

“Yeah,” said Mauss, inspecting the bottom of his mug.

Jeffrey played monkey on his father’s shoulders.

“I dunno,” said Mauss. “It feels strange today, slow-like, you know? Like the jungle can’t shake off its sleep.”

“That’s Chaahk,” said José, grinning widely. “Or more probably it’s you being drop-dead tired from the crazy hours you keep, waking up to talk to the trees in the morning. Did they tell you anything today, or did you step in an ant hill and get bit up like usual? One day you’re going to meet a snake and get yourself killed.”

Mauss scratched at his left hand, at the blank spot where his ring and pinkie had been, once, before they’d got blown off by a bullet in that god-damned war. Not something he wanted to think about down here, in his little patch of wild, or rather, in José’s little patch, but it wasn’t like his hand was just some souvenir he could throw away. The world hadn’t just felt slow this morning; it had felt tingly.

“Something’s coming,” Mauss said. And then, then the wind blew, just for a moment, and it was damn eerie. It sounded like water, the way it came, pressing down against all of the leaves and tent flies. The way it strummed the clothes line like a melodramatic soloist with a violin.

José laughed, maybe a little too loud, and slapped Mauss in the thigh. “The rain is coming,” he said, “and by the end of today we’re all going to be very, very wet.”

“Wet!” Jeffrey repeated, before running off to tug on one of the female student’s t-shirts. The action was accompanied by a sudden squeal of protest. Mauss laughed then too, because this was life, this was the good part of life, and he had no complaints.

*

Coming down from the dining hall, bringing his dishes back to the kitchen, life suddenly got more complicated. Rita was standing outside the thatch and adobe hut chatting animatedly with some man Mauss had never seen in his life. Some short, Scottish man who was dressed like an absolute fucking lunatic.

Sure, the dew-touched morning was still slightly chill, but in two, three hours, it would be blazing. The man was wearing a coat and sweater — a damn ugly grandma-knit sweater too, all covered with little question marks. And he had an umbrella, which was just about the most useless thing you could truck around in the jungle; it hadn’t rained for months, and when the clouds did burst there wasn’t no umbrella yet made that would be keeping anyone dry.

You got wet in the rain forest; that was just how it happened.

About the only almost useful piece of clothing the mad man had was his hat, which looked like it could have come off any tourist stand in Panama.

“Who are you?” Mauss asked the little man, interrupting his conversation with Rita.

The man turned. He had a real funny expression on his face; like he was trying be silly while making a deal with the devil. He bowed — actually bowed — and doffed his hat. “Geoffrey Mauss, I presume?” he said, rolling the ‘r’s and turning Mauss’s name into something it wasn’t. “Of no relation to Marcel, but still a very fine social scientist in your own right.” The man replaced his hat, stood up, and offered a handshake. Mauss refused.

“I asked a question,” Mauss said.

“Indeed you did,” said the little man. “But who will answer it I wonder? And will you like the answer you get?” The Scott’s eyes went dark and brooding for a moment. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it, and said, in an altogether different tone of voice: “Allow me to introduce myself; I am the Doctor.”

“The who what?” said Mauss.

“The Doctor,” the little man repeated. “I’ve come to take a look about your site, and I’ve brought my assistants with me —” he looked back over his shoulder towards the kitchen.

“Hex! Ace!” he called.

“Comin’, Pohessor,” shouted a rather slurred female voice. It sounded like her mouth was stuffed full of something, and indeed, when she emerged from the kitchen she had half a bean tortilla wrap in one hand, the other half stuck somewhere behind her bulging cheeks. She looked maybe twenty-five, and rough, and lean.

She wore khaki pants and a skin-tight tank top made out of some kind of silvery fabric. Her brown-blonde hair was wrapped up into a bun, and she had a red bandana draped around her neck. Mauss’ eyes lingered on the bandana for a short while before snapping up to her face.

She’d been in war too. He could tell. Though not if it was the real, formal kind, or the fighting you came on in bad neighbourhoods and nightmares.

“Hex!” yelled the irate little Scottish man.

“Coming!” a young man yelped, in what sounded like an Irish accent to Mauss, though he vaguely suspected that it was from some other region entirely. He’d been pretty good at accents once, but that had faded over the years. A moment later, a model-pretty blond-y boy in jeans and an un-ironed shirt stumbled out of the kitchen. He had a tortilla in each hand and had a definite rabbit-in-the-headlights look.

“Ace and Hex,” the little Scottish man said, waving at his two associates.

All Mauss could think was: Damn tourists. How the hell did they get out here?

“The Doctor wants to join you today,” said Rita. “He has ideas about the settlement pattern of the area; very different from what you think. He thinks R-506 was aligned with Tikal.”

Mauss stared at the little man. “And what did you say your name was?”

“Just Doctor. I’m fully accredited. I shan’t be any bother. I have identification if you like…” he began pawing around in his coat pockets.

“Don’t bother,” said Mauss.

The little man stopped his search and seemed to deflate slightly. There was a gleam in his too-blue eyes that Mauss didn’t like, or trust.

“I didn’t say no,” said Mauss. “I do want to know where the hell you’re getting your information from; this site, this entire region was under Caracol. It switched up a bit before the hiatus, but that’s not what you mean; is it?”

“It might have been an outpost,” said ‘just Doctor’. “An out-lying colony. It’s not like any grouping you’ve dug before.”

“You’re right,” Mauss said, laughing ironically; “it hasn’t been dug up, looted, tilled, or dynamited by someone else yet!”

“Dynamite!” said the woman ‘just Doctor’ had introduced as Ace. “That’s Ace!”

“Yeah, really,” said Mauss, fixing her down with a stare, trying to figure out what these strangers were about. “Damn 1920s treasure seekers, coming out of your great and noble country too I might add. Didn’t bother recording anything; just blew the top off all the big pyramids and took out anything green and shiny.”

“A terrible waste,” said the Doctor. He nudged Ace, saying her name in a low and urgent way as he did so.

“A terrible waste,” she muttered, but she still looked a bit too keen on the idea of explosions.

“Anyway,” said Mauss, making a decision, “you can tag along if you like, but if you die or get left behind it’s on your own asses and not the project.”

“That’s acceptable,” said the Doctor. “It’s very kind of you to be so accommodating.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see that trailer?” Mauss pointed to a large, open-faced, metal trailer hooked up to the back of a big, green farm tractor. It was parked in a clearing at the edge of camp just by the side of the access road. Some students were already finding themselves positions to perch in. “That leaves in fifteen minutes,” said Mauss. “I’m going to fill up my water bottles, grab my gear, and take one last toilet trip. You want to ride with us, you be on that trailer by the time I get back.”

“Thank you once again,” said the Doctor, and he and his two friends went off to find their spots.

Mauss stumbled back to his tent, shaking his head, trying to clear out the funk. He had no clue why he’d done that. Maybe he thought letting them tag along would be less bother than leaving them in camp for the lab staff to deal with? Damn, but he was going crazy, finally.

The mist was just starting to burn off, leaving the sky a hazy cobalt; like Mauss’ eyes, like the stranger’s eyes —

There wasn’t any wind, or real clouds besides the mist, but a way off in the distance the thunder kept on a-rumbling. Yeah, Mauss thought, something was coming. Something —

 

tbc


	2. Hex

_the world we adapt to is not the world as it is but the world as we imagine it to be_  
  
V. Gordon Childe  
  
  
  
  
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Hex, clinging on for dear life, “but you know, somehow this just doesn’t seem safe.”  
  
The tractor and the trailer it towed behind bumped along a packed-dirt road, churning up gag-inducing clouds of dust and swerving dangerously. The left flank of the road was choked with dense jungle grow-back and bracken that forced the passengers on that side to dodge errant branches and vines lest they get smacked in the face. The other side of the road was bordered by a steep, twenty-foot drop bottomed by a showcase example of slash and burn agriculture. With the cut trees and vast stretches of black lonesome ash, it looked like a drop into hell.  
  
“You should have seen the time Brendan fell off,” a female student said to Hex, her eyes laughing at his discomfort. “He flipped right over the side rail and down the slope, isn’t that right Brendan?”  
  
Brendan shifted uncomfortably, but that might have been the motion of the trailer as much as anything. There were about twenty-five of them, staff and students, and Hex and Ace and the Doctor, all being jostled around by the jerking tractor and uneven terrain.  
  
“Oh, my god,” Hex said softly, not really able to repress himself from saying it. He could feel the laughter Ace was repressing at his panic. She was probably enjoying the ride. That would be like her.  
  
He chanced a look.  
  
She wasn’t in the middle of the trailer like him. She was actually sitting on one of the guard rails, on the same side as the drop. She let herself lean dangerously backwards every time the tractor took a jolt or curve. Hex quickly looked away, feeling slightly nauseous.  
  
The Doctor was near the front of the trailer, sitting on the floor like a normal, sane person. He was leaned up against a tarp-covered bundle of backpacks and dig supplies. He wasn’t talking, Hex noticed, just sitting, looking around. He was really still too, considering how they were all getting bounced about, but that was the Doctor; centre of the storm, always. He was probably brooding or scheming on something. That man Mauss kept glaring at him.  
  
“So, ah, what’s your name?” Hex asked the female student who’d spoke to him. She was blonde with a touch of sunburn on her nose and fine, regular features that wouldn’t get noticed in a crowd. She wore an already dust-caked blue t-shirt. Hex thought she was rather pretty, all said. She looked about twenty-ish.  
  
“Sandra,” she said, “short for Cassandra, but don’t let me catch you calling me it.”  
  
“That was my mother’s name,” said Hex.  
  
“What?” Sandra asked, speaking loudly over the belching tractor engine.  
  
“My m — I’m sorry, my name’s Hex,” Hex said, raising his volume, “which is short for Hector, but don’t let me catch you calling me it either.”  
  
Sandra laughed. “And your friends?”  
  
“Ah, well, the lunatic over on the guardrail is Ace, and she’d have my head if I told you her real name. Well, first name. She’ll answer to McShane. And that’s the Doctor sitting in the corner.”  
  
“Does he have a name?” asked Sandra.  
  
“I guess, I don’t know. He always changes the subject if you try to ask him. He’s a good friend, though, he’s got me out of some rough scrapes.”  
  
“Get into those a lot?”  
  
“You ask a lot of questions,” said Hex.  
  
“Yeah, well, you’re a mysterious stranger. I think I’ve got the right.”  
  
“Point taken. Only, I’m not even completely sure where I am. We just stepped out of the — got turned around a bit, and stumbled in. The Doctor seems to know what’s going on, but then he always does, and Ace is old hat at this sort of thing, but I just trail along really.”  
  
“Well, we’re currently on-route to an archaeological dig.”  
  
“Yeah, I gathered that, thanks.”  
  
“And we’re in Belize, in case you’re completely geographically challenged. In the Cayo district.”  
  
“That’s in Central America, isn’t it?”  
  
“Someone’s a clever boy.”  
  
“Hey! Well, I guess that explains the jungle. I was still a bit afraid we were on another colony world, the last one — you’re looking at me like I’m nuts, but I guess I sound that way, sorry.”  
  
“Just a little bit.”  
  
“Sorry, goes with the territory, I guess. But there were trees with spikes on them.”  
  
“They’re called Give and Take trees. Give a bit of pain, take a bit of flesh, or that’s the joke anyways.”  
  
“It’s not very funny.”  
  
“No, you’re right. It has some kind of medicinal use I guess. I don’t really know. For stomach aches, or as a pain killer, or something.”  
  
“Seems a bit ironic for something to stab you and then give you an analgesic,” said Hex. “Maybe it is a bit funny. I wonder how you’d harvest it —”  
  
“You might want to duck,” said Sandra, doing so herself.  
  
“What?”  
  
Hex was bumped in the back of the head by a thick tangle of vines as the tractor took a sharp corner, steering itself and its cargo away from the field-side road and into a green tunnel roughly cut through the jungle. The clouds of dust that had been a plague along the open road immediately subsided. Hex rubbed at the back of his head. “Ow…”  
  
“You’re lucky it was a vine and not a branch,” Sandra observed.  
  
“Ow…”  
  
The light was green, and all of the passengers onboard the trailer leaned far forward to avoid the mess of vines and branches above their heads. Those brave fools seated on the railing had their backs hammered by trunks, branches, and bramble.   
  
The tractor slowed. The terrain shifted. A few staff members hopped out to walk in front of the vehicle with machetes, cutting down any vegetation that was growing too close, before hopping back in to continue the ride. There was a steep hill and the trailer was dragged up it at a near 60° degree angle. Hex scrambled his hands at the trailer bed looking for a grip, joshing against the staff and student he shared the trailer with. They all seemed more or less nonplussed by the roller coaster ride. Several gave Hex angry looks.  
  
“Sorry,” he mumbled as he ended up more or less in Sandra’s lap.  
  
Sandra laughed at him. So did Ace.  
  
“Making a girlfriend, Hex-y?” she called out from her position on the guardrail.  
  
Hex blushed profusely, and was about to formulate a reply, when the tractor reached the top of the hill and dove down the other side, taking Hex’s stomach with it.  
  
“WoooWeee!” Ace shouted.  
  
“They’re terraces,” Sandra said.  
  
“What?” said Hex, who’d been paying rather more attention to keeping the tortillas he’d eaten earlier from escaping. He swallowed hard a few times. He would win this battle. He would.  
  
“These hills, the reason they’re so bumpy is the terraces. The Maya used to plant their crops on them.”  
  
Hex nodded, not really understanding, and not trusting what might come out if he opened his mouth. He wasn’t quite sure why this girl kept talking to him. She seemed very chatty.  
  
“He looks about ready to spill his beans,” said Brendan, nudging another student in the ribs. That student rolled their eyes and looked away, trying to ignore the nasal jibe as Brendan continued on oblivious: “Just do it over the side and not on my shirt, ‘kay?”  
  
“I’ll try that, thanks,” said Hex.  
  
Then the tractor’s engine belched, shuddered, and ground to a halt. The trailer kept going with its own momentum and crashed gently into the back of the tractor. The hitch jangled.  
  
“Not again!” someone up front groaned.  
  
“Is this a scheduled stop?” asked Hex.  
  
“Don’t know, the students haven’t been to this site before,” said Sandra.  
  
There was a minor flurry of activity around the tractor as staff jumped off the trailer and started to inspect their transport’s engine. The Doctor joined them, and his Scottish lilt rose above their muttered curses.  
  
“Seems to have over-heated, some time will have to be spent letting it cool down.”  
  
This was followed by several angry comments questioning the Doctor’s ability as a mechanic, and a short, heated argument.  
  
“End of the line,” Mauss finally yelled, kicking the front of the tractor with one booted foot.  
  
Hex flinched. He was a bit afraid of the man. He seemed, angry at the world, too loud, and Hex was certain he didn’t like them much.  
  
“I guess it wasn’t scheduled,” said Sandra, standing up and brushing some of the dust off her shirt.  
  
“Yeah…” said Hex, maintaining his position as the trailer unloaded around him. They were stranded, he realised, in the jungle, with no transportation. Oh, god. Why was no one panicking?  
  
“Come on, you lump,” said Ace, grabbing Hex’s arm and pulling him to his feet. “We’re not far from where we would have been left off anyway, apparently. But we’ve got a bit of a hike.”  
  
Hex allowed Ace to lead him off the trailer and onto the road. The rest of the group — students, staff, and the Doctor — had already started out ahead of them. The man driving the tractor, José, Hex thought he’d heard his name was, had apparently opted to stay behind to work at coaxing the vehicle back to life for the return trip.   
  
The road ahead was rocky and overgrown. Saplings and grass grew everywhere, unflattened by the stalled tractor’s wheels. The road dipped steeply up and down, and now that he was on foot Hex could almost see what Sandra had been talking about:  
  
There were terraces, sort of, the hills were made of flat ridges. There were even a few stones still bordering along them. He was walking over old fields, Hex realised. Dead people’s fields.  
  
“What are we doing here?” he asked Ace.  
  
“Following the Professor,” she said.  
  
“Don’t you ever question it, though? Where he brings us? Why?”  
  
“All the time, Hex, but the Professor knows what he’s doing.”  
  
“I know he does,” Hex said, adding the word ‘mostly’ under his breath, “but why do we tag along with it? What are we doing here? And don’t tell me we’re on holiday, because there’s no such thing with you two.”  
  
“Oi! I resent that. There’s probably something at the dig the Professor wants to see; he likes stuff like that. Anyway, we’re here because the Professor needs someone to watch his back, when he gets it wrong.”  
  
“That’s what you do,” said Hex. “What about me? Why aren’t I back at St. Gart’s tending patients on the night shift right now? Instead here I am, walking through a jungle in Central America, who knows when —”  
  
“The Doctor said we’re around the year 2056,” said Ace.  
  
“Oh, good,” Hex said, unimpressed. “So if we took a jump across the pond I might run across myself when I’m having a mid-life crisis. Or worse, I might find out that —”  
  
“You’re here to watch _my_ back,” said Ace, interrupting his morbid train of thought. “And, before you say it, I watch your back too. It’s what we do.”  
  
“I guess,” said Hex. He idly swatted at a mosquito. The first he’d seen. There weren’t that many bugs, he realised, considering it was a jungle. He wondered if that was normal. “Hey, A— ” he started.  
  
“Looks like they’re turning off,” said Ace, pointing ahead. The staff and student procession were, indeed, getting off the main road and disappearing down a narrow jungle trail. Hex and Ace followed.   
  
They were reduced to single file by the tree trunks and greenery pushing in from either side. It all seemed slightly yellow now that Hex was up close and personal with it. Dry. The ground underfoot was hard packed, and it wasn’t from being walked on. There were cut-off stumps of wood sticking out of the trail at random intervals, sharp wooden stakes waiting to skewer anyone daft enough to lose their footing. Up ahead, Hex could hear the sound of someone swinging a machete, making the path wider.  
  
It hadn’t been hot when they’d got on the trailer, but now the heat was starting to rise. The air was moist, uncomfortably warm, and somewhat difficult to breath. Hex could feel the sweat trickling along his brow. He really wanted a drink, but of course they hadn’t bothered with that kind of basic preparation. Just hop and go, as usual, never a thought to bringing a water bottle. He wondered how long it would take to get seriously dehydrated.  
  
“It’s really dry,” he said to Ace, “It’s humid, but for a rainforest I mean, shouldn’t it be wetter?”  
  
“Maybe they’re having a drought?” speculated Ace.  
  
“It’s completely natural,” said Sandra, who’d appeared on the path in front of them. The procession seemed to be stalled ahead of her. “End of the dry season, it’ll probably be pouring soon, or at least that’s what the guide book says, and the staff.”   
  
“Oi, what’s the hold up?” called Ace from behind Hex.  
  
“There’s a snake on the path,” said Sandra. She smiled sweetly over Hex’s shoulder, and Hex wondered why. It was obviously intentionally, and he could practically hear Ace starting to fume behind him. She was keeping it in though, probably smiling right back.  
  
“I don’t like snakes,” said Hex. “Something about them…”  
  
“Wimp,” said Ace.  
  
“I’m not afraid. I just don’t like things that might be poisonous is all. We had a man in the A &E once who’d been keeping exotic ones illegally. Didn’t have a license or anything. It was horrible. His whole arm swelled up, and we didn’t have any anti-venom on hand, because why would we? Cobras aren’t exactly part of the normal local London wildlife.”   
  
“Is it poisonous?” asked Ace.  
  
“Oh, probably,” said Sandra. “But they’ll kill it if it is.”  
  
“Way’s clear!” yelled someone up ahead. The group started moving again.  
  
“Keep safe,” Sandra said, before turning, and rushing a bit to keep up.  
  
“I don’t much care for your girlfriend,” Ace whispered to Hex.  
  
“What’s wrong with her?”  
  
“Just rubs me the wrong way is all.”  
  
“Jealous?”  
  
“Toad brain.”  
  
“Eh, play nice.”  
  
They kept walking; up-hill, mostly. Hex kept getting thirstier, but he didn’t say anything. He could see the staff and students ahead of him occasionally pulling out their bottles and canteens to take a quick swig. Hex licked his lips, bobbed his throat, and kept going.  
  
“You okay?” Ace asked, nudging him in the back a bit when his step faltered.  
  
“Oh, fine,” said Hex, feeling slightly embarrassed. “Just not used to the weather is all. It’s not exactly back home is it? Still, wouldn’t say no to a drink, or a sit down, might end up with heat stroke if we keep marching like this.”  
  
“Seconded,” said Ace.  
  
Luckily, they didn’t have much further to go. After a few minutes they arrived in an ash-floored clearing about thirty metres square. There were four mounds bordering the area, one to each side; three were medium humps, about two metres high, the fourth was roughly twice that. Odd frames, made of what looked like stripped saplings, were set up over each of the four.   
  
It was hotter in the clearing, under the direct glare of the sun, and the air smelled strongly of burnt wood.   
  
“Guess we’ve arrived then,” said Ace. She flopped onto the biggest of the ashy hillocks, profoundly unconcerned by the black and grey dirt that stuck to her skin and sweaty clothing as a result.  
  
“Guess…” said Hex. He squinted at the remorseless jungle sun. There were no clouds in the sky, just a smoky grey mist. The air pressed up against his skin like warm, wet blanket. There was thunder in the distance, and the hoots and screams of thirsty monkeys.  
  
“Ah! Ace, Hex!” said the Doctor, springing up between them. His umbrella was hooked onto to edge of his sleeve and he was delightedly rubbing his hands together. He paused. “You look a bit peaky,” he said to Hex.  
  
“Feel a bit peaky,” said Hex.   
  
The Doctor put his hand in his pocket and dug around a bit. He finally came out with a narrow, glass vial, quite long, filled with some sort of translucent purple fluid. “Drink some of that,” the Doctor said, pitching the vial to Hex, who caught it in a two-handed clap. “And you too, Ace, I wouldn’t want either of you to get dehydrated.”  
  
“It tastes like watermelon,” said Hex, wiping off his lips and tossing the vial to Ace, who stashed it in a trouser pocket when she was done refreshing.  
  
“Welcome to R-506,” said the Doctor, sweeping his arm to indicate the clearing. All around them, staff and students were resting; putting down their gear, talking, and taking little sips out of their water bottles.  
  
“And what’s that?” asked Hex.  
  
“It’s an ancient Maya ruin, a very old, very strange place close between the boundaries of different... yes.” The Doctor licked his finger and turned it to the wind, frowning. He sounded like he was about to continue speaking when —  
  
“What are you all standing around for?” shouted Mauss. “Into your groups; get those tarps and screens up, then wait for instruction.”   
  
The clearing burst into life as the students scrambled to carry out his instructions. Tarps unfolded out of backpacks and were harnessed into place over the frames Hex had noticed propped over the mounds. Some of the staff went off into the bush with their machetes, cutting down more saplings to make frames for suspending the heavy, wooden sifting screens.  
  
“You came out, you help too,” said Mauss, coming over to the mound where Ace was lounging. “There’s no slacking in the field.”  
  
“Yes, I suppose we did,” said the Doctor, grinning.   
  
Mauss didn’t return the smile. He threw a bound up tarp at Hex, who caught it hard against his stomach. “You and the girl can help the Ass put that up,” said Mauss. He turned to the Doctor. “I want to talk to you.”  
  
The Doctor nodded, cheerfully. “See you soon,” he said to Hex and Ace, following Mauss out of the clearing and back onto the trail.  
  
“Is he always that cheerful?” asked Hex, unrolling the tarp.  
  
Brendan walked up to him, blinking abstractly as the sunlight refracted through his glasses. “He’s not a bad man,” he said, “just tough. He’s good at what he does. We’re lucky to have him as a prof.”  
  
“He’s a professor?” asked Hex.  
  
“Well, this is a field school,” said Brendan. “If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be getting funding, or a proper licence, or anything, and that would be _illegal_. Looting, and looting is _bad_. I wouldn’t be here if we were _looting_.”  
  
“Right, then,” said Ace, pointedly, rolling her eyes, “let’s get this done.”  
  
Hex and Ace ended up doing most of the work. Brendan mostly just stood by, blinking, and occasionally poking at the tarp’s loose edges with a big stick he’d picked up somewhere. Sandra came by to help out after a long interlude, as did a few other students. When they were done, Hex, Ace, and the others sat underneath the shade of the newly erected tarp, enjoying the faint coolness it provided.  
  
Then Mauss came back, handing out string and orders.  
  
Hex and Ace were pushed to the side as the students enacted some sort of complex archaeological dance called ‘setting up the unit’. By the time it was done, after much arguing over tape measurers, and whether or not Brendan was holding his plumbob straight, Hex was bored out of his skull.  
  
He sat on the ground, playing idly with the ash and bits of broken pottery and limestone brick. He could feel the sun beating on the back of his neck and knew that he’d have a prize winning burn the next day. An absolute recipe for melanoma he was. Ace had found herself a nice spot on the ground and had curled herself up for a kip, so he couldn’t even look to her for conversation. The Doctor hovered about from unit to unit making a nuisance of himself. He, at least, seemed to be enjoying himself.  
  
Finally, the students finished with their strings and measurements. Hex nudged Ace awake with his foot.  
  
“Oooh, I am going to regret that,” she said, scratching at her sunburnt arms.  
  
“I think something’s happening,” said Hex.  
  
“You and you,” said Mauss, pointing at Brendan and another student, “Screening. The rest of you, clear off this layer of ash, but don’t go any deeper than the ash; got that? I don’t want you digging though the architecture.”  
  
“What about us?” Hex asked, motioning to himself and Ace, hoping desperately to be given a job to do. Anything had to be better than just sitting around getting burnt.  
  
“You can dig too, or lift buckets,” said Mauss.  
  
So the work started. It was hard, and hot, and every time anyone went to wipe the sweat from their face they’d spread a new bit of ashy make-up over their skin like some kind of bizarre archaeological war paint. Hex and Ace mostly ended up lifting buckets between the mound and the screens because they didn’t have trowels and didn’t know enough about what to look for to help with the sifting. Though there were bits of switch-up, and by around noon Hex found himself crouched under the tarp, carefully scratching ash off soil. Sandra worked beside him.  
  
“Enjoying yourself?” she asked.  
  
“Having the time of my life,” he said, dryly. He scraped a bit more ash into his borrowed dust pan, and then tipped that over into a bucket.  
  
“Oh, cheer up,” said the Doctor, leaning over Hex’s shoulder. “Think of this as an opportunity to expand your mind.”  
  
“You could expand your mind with us Professor,” said Ace, stopping by to pick up a bucket to carry to the screen.   
  
“No, no, in this case I prefer to observe,” the Doctor said.  
  
“Hey, I think I’ve found something,” said Hex as his borrowed trowel snagged on something hard. His voice raised in disbelief: “I think I’ve actually found something.”  
  
“Did you?” asked Sandra. She stopped digging and leaned over. “What is it? What have you found?”  
  
“Technically you’ve found many somethings today,” said the Doctor, “if those large bags over by the screens are any indication.”  
  
“I don’t mean a little bit of pottery I can’t even tell from the dirt,” said Hex, scraping wildly. “I mean I think I’ve actually found something.”  
  
“Then I would advise you to stop,” said the Doctor, “and let someone in higher authority and with slightly more knowledge take over for you.”  
  
“He’s trying to steal your discovery,” said Ace, laughing as Hex reluctantly put down his borrowed trowel.  
  
“I am not,” said the Doctor. “Professor Mauss, Professor Mauss!” the Doctor shouted, waving his arms to get his attention. “My friend Hex appears to have found something.”  
  
Mauss descended on the unit, jostling Hex to the side and picking up his dropped trowel. Mauss carefully exposed the object as Hex, Ace, Sandra, and all of other the students assigned to that unit crowded around. The Doctor stood back at a distance, watching them all.  
  
It was stone, Hex saw, as Mauss cleared away the ash without moving the object. It was dark stone, rounded, and quite large; almost half a metre long. There were carvings on it.  
  
“It’s beautiful,” said Sandra, sounding entranced.  
  
Hex tried to lean in for a closer look at his discovery when his attention was pulled away by a terrible noise, a strangled cry, and it had come from the Doctor.  
  
Hex jumped up, away from the unit, and rushed to his friend’s side. Ace had got there first. The Doctor was on his hands and knees in the ash, panting.  
  
“Professor,” Ace said, over and over, kneeling beside him, clinging to his shaking arm. “Are you all right? Professor!”  
  
The Doctor didn’t respond.  
  
  
 _tbc_


	3. Ace

The first discovery of a unique or unexpected assemblage should be regarded as a possible accident; even the second discovery could be a coincidence. In general, only repeated, independent discoveries establish a pattern that merits serious behavioral interpretation.

Richard G. Klein, Out of Africa and the Evolution of Human Behavior

 

"Professor!” Ace said, holding onto the Doctor’s arm. His breaths were short and shallow and his eyes seemed unfocused as he stared at the ground. She should have noticed, Ace berated herself, whatever it was, she should have noticed, and she should have been ready to catch him before he fell.

Ace had seen the Doctor like this before, more times than she cared to remember, but it never got easier. And worse, she didn’t know why it was happening; what the trigger to his collapse was. Hex was fussing. He gently eased the Doctor into a more comfortable position on his right side.

“Help me get his jacket off,” said Hex.

“What?” asked Ace, briefly breaking her eyes away from the Doctor to look at him.

“It’s probably heat stroke,” said Hex. “We need to get his jacket and jumper —”

“The Doctor doesn’t get heatstroke, Hex, this isn’t — Professor, come on, snap out of it.”

Ace frantically waved her hand in front of the Doctor’s eyes. She knew she shouldn’t panic. She knew he’d be okay; he was the Professor after all, he was always okay. She forced herself to calm down.

“Professor…” she said, again, not knowing what else to do. A little crowd was gathering around her, Hex, and the Doctor’s prone form. Ace hunched over him, instinctively protecting him from their view.

He blinked.

“Professor?”

He blinked again. And groaned.

“Ace,” the Doctor said, softly. He sat up, with the help of Hex, and rubbed his head, the ash on his palm spreading a streak across his forehead, like a bruise.

“I don’t like it when you do that,” said Ace, giving the Doctor a gentle cuff on the shoulder.

“Neither do I,” said the Doctor. “I suppose I’ll have to spend the rest of my lives living quietly at a retirement home somewhere in Brighton? Just think, Ace; we could have matching rocking chairs.”

Ace gave him another, not so gentle this time, shove. “Never,” she said, grinning.

Though she did wonder sometimes if that would be better, if they could still be the Doctor and Ace if there wasn’t the danger. Then that man Mauss interrupted her thoughts by crouching down in front of the Doctor. Ace glared at him, ready to spit venom if need be.

“Are you all right?” Mauss asked, with far more concern than Ace had been expecting. She looked at his left hand, where it rested on his knee. Only three fingers. She wondered about him. He had a past; she could tell.

“Right as rain,” the Doctor said, and from the way he was rolling his ‘r’s Ace could tell that he was fibbing, but she decided to play along anyway. For his sake.

“Just a mild case of heat exhaustion,” the Doctor continued, shucking his outer layers of clothing as he spoke. “My friend Hex was right. He is a qualified nurse, you know, very good with the medicine. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“What were you expecting, wearing all that?” Mauss asked. The harsher tone was back in his voice, Ace noticed. Anger masked the previous concern. That, and impatience for fools.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor said. “Rather silly of me. Still, lesson learned. I’ll just go have a rest in the shade while you continue cataloguing whatever it is that Hex found.”

Mauss frowned and pulled his watch out of the shirt pocket he'd stashed it in, muttering something under his breath about wasting time.

“Time doesn’t like to be wasted,” the Doctor said, philosophically.

“It’s lunch,” said Mauss, looking up from his watch, and glaring at the Doctor. “You hear that?” he shouted to the clearing and the gathered crowd. “LUNCH!”

Ace and Hex helped the Doctor stand up and walk to the shade afforded by the jungle’s edge. Hex fetched the Doctor’s shed clothing and a trio of up-turned buckets for them to sit on. In the clearing, the students scrambled to find their own seating arrangements, constrained by reminders from Mauss and the other supervising staff that they were not allowed to eat inside of the units. There weren’t enough buckets for all by a long shot, and most ended up crouched on the ground, eating their packed lunches with dirty fingers and ashy mouths.

“So,” asked Ace, leaning close to the Doctor’s ear. She kept one stabilizing hand on his shoulder in case he took another fit. “What was it really? I know you don’t get bothered by the heat that easy.”

“Time,” the Doctor said. He had that funny voice that Ace knew meant he was trying to explain things that he didn’t think humans could understand; things that he didn’t understand. “It was a very strange, very sudden distortion of time. My time.”

“Your time?” Hex asked.

“Yes, mine. And yours.” He paused, staring hard at the question mark tip of his umbrella.

“Then why didn’t we feel anything?” asked Hex.

‘Because we aren’t Time Lords,’ Ace wanted to tell him, rolling her eyes, but she let the Doctor do the job for her:

“Different senses,” the Doctor said, “My people feel that type of disturbance with much more clarity than most species. In fact, I’ve been feeling slightly odd since we stepped out of the TARDIS this morning. I wanted to follow it. Discover where it was coming from...”

“And you didn’t think of saying anything to us?” said Ace.

“No, well, I am sorry. It didn’t seem that serious, and I didn’t know it was our own time lines caught into the snarl. It was more… an interest project, a bit of a mystery to amuse myself with. I did say holiday…”

“Professor, I don’t like where this is going,” said Ace.

“It’s nothing serious, I’m sure,” said the Doctor. He shook Ace’s protective hand off his shoulder, and composed himself; or rather, he put on a big, fat, fake smile and expected Ace not to notice. She was hurt, really, that he still did that, after all these years. But she knew him well enough by now to know that it wasn’t because he didn’t trust her; it was because he didn’t trust himself.

“Lunch!” said the Doctor, smiling. “What about lunch! Hex, pass me my jacket, I did pack something away for us earlier.”

Hex complied. The Doctor put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a few small, Tupperware-like containers. Inside them were still-warm flour tortillas from breakfast, beans, cheese, rice, and several oranges.

Hex dug into the food happily. So did Ace, commenting that:

“After all these beans, excuse me if I don’t share a bunk with either of you any time soon.”

“Yeah, well, at least I don’t snore,” said Hex, winking.

“Oi! Do not!”

“Like a drowning rhinoceros.”

“Watch it, blond-y, or I’ll give you a rhinoceros.”

The Doctor sat back on his bucket, smiling faintly at their bickering. Ace was so absorbed in the mock-argument that it took her a moment to notice that the weather had shifted.

The temperature had dropped several degrees, and a wind picked up from somewhere. It was a warm, moist wind that slapped against Ace's face like a wet sheet. The kind of wind with presence. The jungle swayed to its tune. The monkeys hollered their displeasure. A bundle of palm nuts knocked together, letting out a sound like a drunk playing on a wooden xylophone. It echoed eerily against the darkened sky; thunder rumbled, all of the birds had gone quiet.

Ace looked around the clearing. Most everyone had finished their lunches. Mauss was taking pictures of the unit where Hex had found his rock. The other staff and students seemed to be instinctively gathering under the other tarps.

“We’d better go join them,” said the Doctor, easing himself to his feet. He stooped, momentarily, to gather his jacket and jumper, before setting off for shelter. Ace and Hex followed him. He went to a tarp pitched over one of the smaller mounds. It didn’t mean anything; no one was gathering on the large mound where Mauss was still taking photos. Still, Ace couldn’t overlook that the Doctor had chosen a mound at the opposite end of the complex.

Then the rain came.

It was visible in its approach; great, hazy grey water sheets. Ace heard it hitting the jungle, then saw it hitting the clearing floor, and finally she felt it blowing sidewise into their makeshift shelter. It was warm, and wet, and a bit soothing after all the heat. It collected into lakes on top of the tarp and then fell over the sides in narrow waterfalls.

“What are you all doing sitting around for?” Mauss snapped from the large mound unit. He tucked his camera back into his waist pack. “There’s still work to do.”

And so there was.

“These people are crazy, if you ask me,” Ace confided to the Doctor. She was so covered in ash and mud that it was difficult to make out where her clothing stopped and skin began. “Completely over the moon lala.”

“I like archaeologists,” he told her. “I knew one once, a very nice young women…” he trailed off, smiling wanly. The look on his face said that he thought Ace should know what he was talking about. She got a tingly feeling along her neck; all of those little hairs standing up and dancing, even under the mud.

“What happened to her?” Ace asked.

“Time,” said the Doctor, sighing heavily. “Twisting time. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you have friends one day, and the next they don’t exist anymore. People become unpeople.”

“Are you okay, Professor?” Ace asked, steeling herself for another fainting episode. She tried not to think about people becoming unpeople, because that was all part of travelling with the Professor, and she was used to all of that, sort of. Rain drummed against her skin putting track marks in her dirty face paint.

The Doctor shrugged heavily. He put his jacket back on, but not his jumper, and, despite the downpour, he used his closed brolly to lean on, making himself a rough tripod. “Fine, fine…” he said, sounding distracted, “that was a long time ago for us, you wouldn’t remember, Ace. Licensing,” he finished, vaguely.

Ace looked at him hard for a long moment to make sure he wasn’t going to fall over. She didn’t like the idea of being erased, of having her memories wiped away. There were few enough people who knew she existed — really knew she existed — as was. Even her own mother thought she was dead, probably. But Ace didn’t think of that. Instead she lifted a bucket and brought it to a sifting screen.

Work ended a few hours later. The rain tapered off around the same time, which Ace found ironically funny, and fixed her notion that everyone involved with the excavation was a complete and utter nutter. There was a rush of activity to take down tarps and pick up bagged artifacts, and then they were back on the trail, walking down over-grown terraces. Wet leaves smacked against Ace’s arms. Every so often there would be a creaking noise and a high up branch would shift, from the weight of a bird, a monkey, or simple contrariness, and spill its weight of collected rain onto the path.

Hex walked stiffly in front of Ace. His jeans were soaked and cemented with mud. He looked highly uncomfortable. He tripped and staggered into a bush on the side of the path. Ace grabbed the back of his collar and stopped him from landing on his face.

“Good save,” the person behind her grunted. Ace looked over her shoulder, and was surprised to see Mauss. He was giving her a critical look. “Bullthorn Acacia,” he said, indicating the plant Hex had very nearly taken a tumble into.

“It has spikes on it,” said Hex, glumly.

“It has ants living in it,” said Mauss. “The jungle isn’t forgiving. There are a hundred and one ways to get yourself dead out here, and even more things that can make your stay highly uncomfortable.” He sounded a bit awed by the idea, Ace noted.

“Ants?” asked Hex. He got to his feet, and kept walking down the trail. Ace followed behind him.

“Respect the ants,” Mauss said, and Ace could hear a half smile in his voice. The other half was a reprimand, probably against Hex for falling, though Ace suspected it might extend to the entire population of planet Earth. She also suspected that Mauss wasn’t really talking about ants at all. Something about him reminded her of the Professor, just a little bit, and she wasn’t sure if it was the good side of the Professor, or that darkness she caught him drifting on sometimes.

“Good for snake bite, though,” Mauss continued, unaware of Ace’s psycho-analysis. “Nothing’s ever black or white; the plant has thorns, the ants protect her and get protection back, and then if ever you get bit you chew the roots, doesn’t save you, but —” he stopped.

“You’ll want to wear proper work pants if you’re going to be joining us again,” he said to Hex. “You look like an idiot in jeans. And you’ll want to be talking to José if you plan on staying around camp. It’s his place and it’s his call. You’ll have to arrange room and board with him.”

“You’ll have to bring it up with the Professor,” said Ace. “He doesn’t trust us kiddies with the big financial decisions.”

“I did talk with him,” said Mauss. He muttered something to himself, and then went quiet.

The walk continued. Ace listened to her Doc Martens making shlicking noises with each mud-laden step. She listened to the birds waking up after the storm and Hex’s heavy breathing. She smelled the strong wet-jungle odour that was cow manure and leaf rot.

They reached the tractor and trailer. It was running again, and there was a small circle of jungle that had been cut down to give it the room to turn about face on the narrow trail. Everyone climbed aboard. There were large puddles in the trailer bed. Ace opted to sit on the rail again, even though it was slick with rain water.

“I told you Chaahk would come today, didn’t I?” said José to Mauss, climbing up behind the steering wheel.

Mauss shook his damp hair out in response and gave an expression that might have been a smile or a frown. He found his place on the trailer and sat in it.

“Who’s Chaahk, do you think?” Hex asked Ace.

“Maya rain god,” Sandra answered, unbidden. Ace bit back a retort against eavesdroppers.

The tractor’s motor started with wet cough and roar. They drove back to camp.

*

Back at camp, the order of the day was showers and clean clothes. Or would have been, had there been showers or clean clothes to put on. There was a murky brown pond that several fully-clothed students seemed intent on making murkier.

“When in Rome…” Ace shrugged, pulling off her mud-caked Doc Martens and jumping in to join them. It wasn’t like she could get wetter than she already was. The water was cooler than she’d expected. The finely silted bottom squelched between her toes. There were millions of tiny particles of muck and jungle leaf suspended in the water, dark specks in an amber stasis. Tiny insects skippered along the surface fleeing from the human invaders.

After some hesitation, Hex kicked off his trainers and joined her. There was some half-hearted splashing, and a few questions from the swimming students. Most had already given Ace and Hex the grill during the work day and as a result Ace had her story well sorted:

“The Professor’s writing up a book on different archaeology experiences. And, um, public responses and stuffs…” She dug her brain. “Like how back in 2012 everyone thought the world was going to end.”

Nearly did too, she thought, but bringing up that particular adventure would only serve to make her look like a crazy women.

“Yeah, people were a bit gullible way back. Are you two his grads then?” asked one of the students. He removed his shirt while speaking to wring its mud out into the pool. He was dark, tough-chested, and in possession of several days beard growth. His name was Darryl Johnstone.

“Nah, I’m not at any school,” said Ace. “Dropped out. I’m just his assistant, ready to help if anything goes wrong. Hex is first aid. Aren’t you Hex?”

“Something just bit my toe,” Hex said.

“Cleaner fish,” said Darryl, laughing. “If you stand still, they eat all of the ticks right off you.”

“Ticks?” asked Hex in a distinctly uncomfortable tone of voice.

“They especially like it between your toes,” said Darryl, “and other places, where it’s nice and warm and snug.”

Hex looked more than slightly alarmed.

“If I were a tick, I’d love to latch onto you,” said Ace. She wasn’t entirely sure why she took so much pleasure in tormenting Hex sometimes. It was sort of like teasing a puppy really. He was so cute and befuddled when he was nervous.

“I vant to suck your bloooood…” Ace drawled, enjoying Hex’s resultant expression immensely.

Then he splashed her, and she splashed back, and the students joined in, and it was fun. Droplets of water flicked through the air, paused into crystal, stopped. Stayed stopped for far longer than was natural. Ace blinked, and time resumed as normal. The droplets hit the pond’s surface and made ripples. Hex sputtered as water went up his nose.

That was odd, Ace thought, but then, it seemed the longer she stayed with the Professor, the more warped her own perception of time was becoming. That and the Cheetah virus, though she hadn’t had any trouble off that front for some years. But what had the Professor said? Snarled timelines?

Ace got out of the pond. She sneaked back to the TARDIS, where she had a proper shower and found some dry gear: loose green trousers and a baggy beige t-shirt, another plain black hair elastic. She still had the Professor’s little purple vial from earlier, and she put that in her trouser pocket, thinking it might be useful later.

As an after-thought, she slathered some sunburn remedy over her toasted arms. She met Hex, who’d had the same idea apparently, in the console room. His hair was still wet and he’d changed into something that looked straight out of Indiana Jones — brown fedora and all. All he was lacking was the whip.

Ace rolled her eyes at him and went out. She wondered what anyone using the outhouse thought when they saw the TARDIS sitting there, a big blue box backed a bit into the bush, or if they noticed it at all. What had the Professor said about that once? Perception filter something? That, and a murmuring rant about people being blind to the world around them. Which was true, Ace thought, though she also thought that sometimes the Professor didn’t give people near enough credit for figuring things out. Other times, he gave them too much by half.

Ace walked into the main, mowed-down part of the camp. As expected, she found the Doctor right in the thick of it.

He was up in the dinning area with Mauss. Both were crouched in front of the artifact Hex had found. As was José . Several students were gathered around as well. The Doctor had managed to get himself into a spotlessly clean version of his jacket and jumper — or maybe it was the same version. Ace wasn’t sure when he’d done it. She didn’t overly care; he was the Professor, he did that.

“What’s up?” Ace asked.

She was ignored.

“There are unknown glyphs on here,” said Mauss, running his finger over the stone’s glossy black surface. “I understand some of these. The year, alright, and this is the glyph for ‘curse’, but beyond that…”

“This one is like an arrow head,” said José. “The way it’s pointing, it could be symbolic, maybe of a battle. Drought?”

“It’s odd, though,” Mauss said, scratching his chin. “You’d expect some depiction of auto-sacrifice. The date is 9 baktuns, 19 k'atuns, and 9 tuns by the long count, got the 4 Lamat 1 Kankin short scrawl over there; are you still so sure about Tikal, Doctor?”

The Doctor made a tsking noise, which Ace interpreted as ‘you’re an idiot’, but he didn’t say anything out loud. He looked worried, and by the same card Ace was worried.

“So what’s it say?” asked Hex, joining the party. He was shushed with icy glares.

“It shouldn’t have been on the surface like that either,” Mauss continued, “and these glyphs. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Would it make more sense if it wasn’t in Maya writing?” the Doctor asked. He had that infuriating I-am-about-to-enlighten-you-but-but-first-I’m-going-to-be-all-mysterious tone that Ace knew far too well. She wanted to tell him about the incident at the pond, but it would have to wait.

“It wouldn’t make sense to me in any language,” said Ace. She smiled. “So, wot’s it say, Professor?”

“It’s in Old High Gallifreyan,” he said, suddenly far too serious.

“What?” said Ace. “Time Lords, here?”

“No,” said the Doctor, “no, no, I don’t think so, hmm… there appear to be a few Maya glyphs interwoven; the date, this one could be curse, or spell… Hex maybe?” He blinked and looked at Hex.

“What are you on about?” asked Mauss.

The Doctor turned his attention back to the stone. He squinted a bit, considering. “It isn’t an arrow head,” he said.

“Then what is it?” asked Mauss.

“Ever play cards?” the Doctor asked.

Mauss leaned over and traced the symbol with a finger tip. He frowned.

“It says,” the Doctor started dramatically, “Ace and Hex, I’ve fallen to the 10th day of the 6th month of the year 819AD, do not attempt to reach me I will use the TARDIS to get back, p.s. watch out for sinkholes, p.p.s. you should really do a head count after reading this.”

The Doctor finished his translation with a hmmm, and a frown.

“I’m not patient for jokes,” said Mauss. “If you’re going to make stuff up, you can back up and do it on someone else’s time.”

“Yes, yes,” said the Doctor. He fidgeted with his paisley. “This is very interesting, very…”

“What’s it mean?” asked Ace.

“I don’t know.”

“But you wrote it?” asked Hex. “I mean, the way you read it out. It sounds like a message, or a warning.”

“Maybe…” said the Doctor, darkly. He blinked and looked at Hex again. “Hex, are you wearing my hat?”

“What this?” asked Hex, taking off his fedora and inspecting it. “I found it in the wardrobe.”

“I used to love that hat…” said the Doctor. “Keep it, Hex, it suits you.”

It really, really didn’t, Ace thought, but she could tell by the look on the Professor’s face that he had a lot on his mind. And in any case, trying to make the Professor understand fashion was like introducing the wrong ends of a magnet — it just didn’t work.

“So what do we do now?” Ace asked.

“Now… I supposed we’d best follow my instructions, and take a head count. Would you care to assist?”

Mauss and José seemed more than happy at the Professor leaving them alone. It wasn’t easy doing a headcount when you didn’t know half the people, and there were camp staff as well as the staff and students they’d met during the day. Ace poked her nose into the kitchen early on in her mission, smiling at Rita, who’d been so nice to them that morning. Ace was then summarily shooed out by Rita as well as José’s wife and great aunt, being told with a returned smile that she wasn’t welcome there until the cooking was done. Whatever it was, it smelled good. By the time it was ready, Ace had reconvened with Hex and the Professor.

They sat on facing benches in a corner of the shaded dinning area, balancing their supper on their laps.

“I think I annoyed every person on the farm,” Ace said.

“Same,” said Hex.

“And what have we learned?” asked the Doctor. He had no meal. He put his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers by his chin.

Hex took a noisy spoonful of soup. It was made of crudely cut vegetables and chunks of chicken, most with the bones still attached, and broth. With spices for taste, and rice for thickness, it was delicious.

“I couldn’t find Brendan,” said Ace. “No one’s seen him since lunch on the site.”

“I don’t remember him being on the trailer back,” said Hex, swallowing.

“Interesting,” said the Doctor. “I suppose I’ll have to inform Mauss. It’s very careless of him to misplace one of his students.”

“I’ll say,” said Ace.

Secretly, she was worried for Brendan, who she remembered only vaguely as a reedy, annoying kid in glasses. Ace had been travelling with the Doctor a long time; long enough to know that when people turned up missing it usually meant trouble was brewing. She also knew that, almost always, once that trouble started, someone ended up dead.

tbc


	4. Doctor

It takes very special qualities to devote one's life to problems with no attainable solutions and to poking around in dead people's garbage: Words like 'masochistic', 'nosy,' and 'completely batty' spring to mind.

Paul Bahn, Bluff Your Way in Archaeology

 

It was all very mysterious.

The Doctor had many thoughts on the matter; they skittered in all directions, like errant children, or wisps of dandelion on the breeze. Make a wish, he thought, cryptically, take a breath, blow them to the wind, see where they take root.

He thought that it probably would surprise his companions to learn that, often enough, he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was thinking about, talking about, or doing. Ace, he knew, realised that he was not infallible, though she contested that with every glance she gave him. She wanted him to be the man whom she’d first met so long ago; her Professor, firm in all his beliefs, calculated in all his actions. He was the great schemer, after all, always doing the right even when it took him into the grey. He tried to be that man for her.

And Hex, well, he was the puzzle, wasn’t he? Poor Hex. He couldn’t know — the Doctor would never let him know — the real guilty reason he was being allowed to trail along. It wasn’t relevant to the point anyway. He made Ace happy and that was that. He took his opinion of the Doctor from her, and that was all he needed to know.

Time was still shifting, and the Doctor had an idea of what might be about to happen. He could hear the rain that had fallen, that had yet to fall. The jungle swayed. He watched Ace and Hex sit on their shifting bench and eat their soup. Then he stood up rapidly, nearly tipping his own seat over in the process, and walked over to where Mauss was crouched, still examining Hex’s artifact. There was a bowl of cold soup on the wooden floor by the archaeologist’s knee.

“Go away,” Mauss said.

“You’re missing a student,” said the Doctor, gently.

“No, I’m not,” said Mauss. The Doctor heard the dismissal, heard the underlying unease; he heard Mauss. The Doctor put a hand on the man’s shoulder, felt the flinch. The professor of archaeology turned on him, viper fast, venom in his glance, ready to spit his annoyance.

“Yes,” said the Doctor, with a steady unnatural gaze. “You are.”

He didn’t like doing that, but it came so easy this time around. It made him feel dirty every time, far too much like — well, but he wasn’t like him, and wouldn’t be. Still, a proud man like Mauss. What is it coming to? What am I coming to?

“Brendan?” said Mauss, shaking away the temporary blankness that hypnosis brought in its wake.

“Yes,” the Doctor said carefully. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

“Night’s coming on,” said Mauss with a creased brow. He wasn’t himself yet, but he would be soon. Soon. There. Mauss stood up in one smooth, determined motion. “STAFF MEETING!” he shouted.

There was a ripple through the dinning area as heads turned and staff members stood. A low whisper rose from the student body. Those called gathered around the Doctor and Mauss.

There was José, the farm owner; Cig, one of his workers; Eliot, a slim ginger grad student; Shawn, another grad student, of the same build but blond; Herbert, a GPS expert from Berkley; and Lodge, a big-boned, hard-muscled woman who was working on surveying the surrounding area with Herbet. They’d be getting married in the fall.

The Doctor had briefly met all of them during his day on site. He hadn’t met Grace, the lab director, but all he needed was a glance to know her life history: how she’d been adopted from Korea in the early 2020s and, unable to fit in with the culture she was raised by and alienated by the one she’d left, she’d turned to archaeology, the monotonous patterns of pot sorting, and dead civilizations that could never turn their backs on her.

That sort of sensing also came easy in this life. Too easily. The Doctor averted his mind promptly. Not that they noticed his peeking anyway. And what they knew couldn’t hurt them — but it could help them, maybe.

Grace had a few grads of her own, but they were at the lab hut sorting artifacts, not high enough on the totem pole to answer the call.

“We’re missing Brendan,” said Mauss.

“The donkey?” asked Eliot.

“No,” said Mauss sarcastically. “The Ass. Of course I don’t mean the donkey.”

“Any idea how long he’s been missing?” asked Lodge in a low, serious voice. She was a tough-looking woman with her savagely cut hair and rippling arms. She made the Doctor think of Ace; all that bluster on top of worry. But that was what all humans were, mostly: bluster.

It was one of their strengths.

“Since before lunch, at least,” said Mauss, relaying the information the Doctor had planted within him. “He went off into the bush to do his jungle business and didn’t come back.”

José peered out at the darkening sky. “Then it’s been some time then.”

Time, thought the Doctor, yes… He could feel it, and now there was an unpleasant niggling. He felt momentarily dizzy as his temporal senses were jangled by — something — but he managed to recover before any of the staff could notice. Or Ace, who was watching him intently from her seat, for all that she was pretending not to. She was always watching.

“Could be dead then, ya?” said Cig in a thick accent. He was worried. They were all worried. Cig took a long draw on his hand-rolled cigarette. Its smoke was leafy and somehow refreshing, not chemical tainted like commercial brands. It still couldn’t be good for him, the Doctor thought, but didn’t react to the notion. He simply sat, watching, as the staff continued their discussion.

“It had to be Brendan,” said Grace, as soft-spoken as her name. She shook her head. “It couldn’t have been anyone else,” she said.

It was true. It did have to be Brendan, the Doctor knew, or rather, felt. Because Brendan the Ass, Brendan — who couldn’t lift buckets, or make interesting small-talk, or hold a straight plumbob — was an outsider, and most probably the only student who could have disappeared and been missed for so long. He was the sort of person other people ignored or belittled without really knowing why. The Doctor had pity for him. It couldn’t be a coincidence, he thought. It never was.

“No sense sitting around here discussing it,” the Doctor said, snapping the increasingly worried conversation into silence. “The light is ebbing, and soon we will be even more in the dark than we currently sit. I suggest search parties; is that feasible?”

Mauss started barking out orders without directly replying: “Eliot, Grace, Shawn, you stay in camp with Rita, look after the students, keep them down and don’t slip a word if you can. And watch them, damn it, last thing we need is another one getting themselves lost.”

He turned to look at José. The command fell out of Mauss’s voice and drifted down to an urgent patter: “You good to take another run on the tractor today?” Mauss asked his friend.

“We’ll find him,” said José, firmly. The two men clenched hands for a moment, eight odd fingers linking beneath a fast-setting sun. Elsewhere in the dinning area, students started to light candles and play cards, stealing short glances at the convening staff members.

“Right,” said Mauss. “Herbert, Lodge, you know the terrain well enough, and Cig, you cut the trails. Grab your knives, we’re going out NOW.”

“I’d like to come as well,” said the Doctor, persuasively, following along the small group as they stalked down the dinning area steps and across the tent field to the tractor.

“Of course,” said Mauss.

The Doctor quickly turned his head. He really didn’t like doing that.

“Wait up, Professor!” shouted Ace, running down from where she’d been sitting.

The Doctor touched his temples in a brief massage. “Ace,” he said, bringing the vowel up from the back of his throat in a low warning.

“Oi, I’m coming too,” she said.

The Doctor knew to tread gently: Ace was strong, but so easily wounded, and there were other forces at work here; things that he didn’t quite understand yet. The low, throbbing ache plaguing his temporal lobe was becoming more and more pronounced. He ignored it and tweaked her nose. “I’d prefer you to stay here,” he said.

“Oi, Professor…” She dragged out the syllables of his nickname, twisting it into a platitude.

“Ace, Ace… I need someone to stay behind, someone who has their feet on the ground, someone who can think.”

“Hex-y can do that.”

“Ace,” he said, bringing a higher warning, one she wouldn’t disobey. He needed to draw his words like a net to catch her. Only words, but didn’t those arrows sting? The archer as well as the prey.

He was getting confused again, mixing his metaphors. Back to the present. The result.

“Right, sorry,” Ace mumbled, clearly disappointed.

He raised her lowered chin with two fingers and tweaked her nose again, softly. He smiled, and let his eyes twinkle. That would work. Yes, that would work on Ace, beautiful Ace. “I’m sorry.” His voice fell to a pressing whisper. “There’s something going on here. Something I don’t like. I want you to keep an eye on things for me. Hex has good eyes, but he doesn’t always know where to put them. I need someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Ace nodded. “Just don’t get yourself killed.”

The Doctor smiled, and climbed into his position on the trailer. “I’ll try my best.”

José fired up the engine and they started to pull away, very quickly. As the tractor and its hitched cargo rolled off into the thickening jungle gloom, Ace suddenly shouted: “Wait!”

The tractor didn’t stop, she jogged behind, and the Doctor heard her say: “But I remember, I was going to tell you, Professor, hang on, stop, it was down by the pond, I saw time stan—”

And then the tractor turned a corner. Ace was cut out of sight, her voice drowned out by the roar of the motor and mud splashing up from its progress. The ride was far faster than the one that had terrorised Hex earlier. It bumped, and swerved. The Doctor held tight to his hat and brolly as they progressed —

Into the dark.

*

Once again, the tractor stalled before its intended rendezvous. Once again, José remained behind to coax it back to life.

The others went down the path, shining their lights, looking for secrets. The jungle was quieter than it should have been. Mauss knew the jungle at night: it was loud with the screeching heat bugs, the frogs, the monkeys, bat wings, and the breezes that knocked together leaves, and wood, and cohune nuts —

The only sound was the five: himself, Cig, Herbert and Lodge, and the strange, unnerving Scottish man who called himself Doctor. The first four hit out with their machetes, widening the trail, making new paths into the wild. And they called as they went, their quarry’s name:

“Brendan!”

“BRENDAN!”

“SHOW YOURSELF, YOU ASS! THIS ISN’T FUNNY!”

The Doctor didn’t say a word, only peered into the blackness beyond their flashlights’ glow, and listened.

*

Nine or ten hours later, it was hard to tell — time seemed to be swelling and bulging at the seams — nine or ten. They returned to camp, less than they had been, with Cig driving the hiccupping tractor. José was not on board, nor was Lodge.

Nor was the Doctor.

Ace’s face fell as she approached and realised the absence. Her heart squeezed. She stiffened her jaw and her fists.

“What did you do to him, toerag?” she yelled at Mauss as he wearily descended from the trailler. He was streaked with mud and sweat and jungle. In the wan morning light and mist, he looked old and brittle, ready to snap. His picked-out features were pale beneath the night’s beard growth.

“They’re gone,” he said simply, clenching and unclenching his broken hand. “They’re just — gone.”

 

End of Episode One

tbc


	5. Episode Two

Episode Two

 

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

William Penn

 

 

“Brendan!”

“BRENDAN!”

“SHOW YOURSELF YOU ASS! THIS ISN’T FUNNY!”

The trees were too silent. So far from the neon pollution of the cities, the stars, and the moon normally provided almost enough light to navigate once your eyes adjusted, but that night clouds had rolled over, leaving the jungle just about cave-black aside from their flashlights.

They searched for almost five hours, weaving circles through the bush and searching for clues by the site. The wood tarp-frames hung up over the units looked like bizarre stick-legged monsters rearing in the dark. Trees and leaves and vines twisted into weird shapes, all of their colour bled out. The closest they came to a clue was finding Brendan’s half-empty water-bottle discarded along a trail.

Mauss muttered swears under his breath as he came back into the site clearing for a re-group. He called his people together.

“We should come back in the morning,” said Herbert, leaning heavily on his machete handle. The blade bowed under his weight.

“He could be dead by morning,” said Mauss, refusing to give up so easily.

“He could be dead now,” said Cig, putting a word to the unspoken elephant with typical blunt honesty.

“Fuck,” Mauss said, at a loss. He paced the site’s plaza. The jungle rose, dangerous and ominous all around their little ash-floored clearing. Mauss loved the jungle, it was the twine that kept his life together, these tall trees and their promise of life. Tonight, it was all betraying him.

Mostly he thought of his students as a means to an end: their presence brought tuition fees and research funding; they paid for these excursions into the wild slopes of the past. They were the coinage that bought his peace of mind. He was never really honest with himself; he didn’t like his students, mostly he didn’t like people in general, but he’d raze his precious jungle and all the ruins and treasures it contained to the ground if need be to keep them safe. Not that it was really ‘his’ jungle, or anyone’s, and that had always been the beauty of it.

Mauss looked at his staff and, belatedly, realised that odd little Scottish man who had been shadowing them was gone. “Fuck,” Mauss said again, louder this time, not desperate but angry. “Where the hell did he go? Damn, fucking tourist.”

“I don’t know why you were letting him come along anyways,” said Lodge as they scouted the perimetre.

“Neither do I,” admitted Mauss, and really he didn’t. Nothing about way the strangers had been treated made one ounce of sense. “Damn it, do we even know his real name? Or his friends’ names?”

“I think the one’s name is Hector,” said Cig, “I overhead him on the way to the site. The girl’s last name is Mc-something. The Doctor, who knows?”

Mauss snorted. Hex and Ace and Doctor. Nicknames were common in Belize; most everyone acquired one after a while, native or not. Not knowing someone’s real name wasn’t something you immediately questioned.

Mauss accepted it and called his friends by their given sobriquets when asked, but he refused to let anyone stick him with a moniker. It was too like the nicknames they’d given each other back in the war, to keep their sanity and separate their real identities from the filth. Mauss had been Pothead after the vase incident, when he’d risked his life to save an ancient amphora from a mine field. His commanding officer had taken it from him, asked him a question:

“Is this worth the lives of your unit?”

“Sir, no, sir.”

The sound of the glazed vessel hitting a rock and skittering in pieces across the sand was the sound of Mauss’s soul tearing apart. International treaties and the protection of antiquity meant nothing next to human life. He was a good solider after that.

The jungle was so very dark.

“DOCTOR!” Mauss said, raising his voice. “Are you out taking a fucking piss or something? Get back here!”

The jungle remain eerily silent, and the Doctor did not return.

“Damn fucking fantastic,” Mauss muttered

“I think we should leave,” said Herbert.

“And just leave him out here?” said Lodge, glaring at her husband-to-be. “He’s not exactly sane.”

“Should never have let him out in the first place,” said Mauss, “but it’s his own fault. We’ll look another twenty minutes and then back to the trailer, we’ll come back in the morning, but not for him.”

*

Ace spent the night on one of the dinning area’s hammocks. Hex slept in another. Ace didn’t sleep, not really. She cat-napped, she dozed, but her dreams were fragmented and progressed by strange leaps of logic that led her again and again back to wakefulness. Or maybe that was just the cold night air, chill against the day-sweat that pressed her shirt to her chest.

They could have slept in the TARDIS, safe in air-conditioned bliss, but that would have probably raised questions about where they’d gone to all night. Besides, Ace wanted to be there and at the ready the moment the Doctor came back. He’d tried pulling one of his mind tricks on her before leaving, she was sure of it, which made her angry, but also concerned as she wondered what he was attempting to protect her from.

“And he tells me not to wander off…” she muttered to no one.

The jungle hummed. The chickens roosted. Bright eyed beetles crawled in the shadows. Ace reacquainted herself with the pros and cons of hammocks. Hex snored like a drowning rhinoceros.

Then came morning. Then came the tractor.

“What did you do to him, toerag?” Ace yelled at Mauss as soon as she realised that the Doctor hadn’t returned. She knew, deep down, that she should be diplomatic, but her mouth went off before her brain kicked in. She instantly regretted it, seeing how worn down the man looked. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been his fault.

Somehow, that frightened Ace more. She didn’t like it when the bad guys were invisible. She needed something to fight. It was engraved into her, even after so much time battling the ineffable with the Professor. Though, if she were honest with herself, her long war had begun long before their meeting on Iceworld. Somehow beating up a Dalek with a baseball bat would always be easier than… this.

“They’re gone,” Mauss said, blankly stating the facts. “They’re just — gone.”

Ace reached up and took his shoulder in a steadying grip. The man looked right about to topple over. He didn’t though, and he shook Ace’s hand off before stalking away towards the kitchen. It wasn’t long after that Ace heard soft female crying coming from that direction.

José’s son Jeffrey was playing on the lawn with one of the camp dogs, a big, pinto-coated jungle mutt. The boy kept squinting at the tractor, at the two staff members who still sat in the trailer comforting each other.

Ace couldn’t bear to watch. Her jaw tightened and she walked away. Towards the outhouse, towards where the TARDIS was hidden, or had been hidden. She didn’t understand the Professor’s message to himself, but he was the Professor and his plans usually worked out. He’d known this was going to happen, and he’d even sent back to tell her and Hex where he’d gone to, given them a date and everything. He’d said he’d use the TARDIS to get himself back, so all she had to do was sit tight and everything would be okay.

She trusted him.

Except, when Ace turned the last corner on the trail to the outhouses, she was confronted with a narrow streak of blue tucked between two giant ferns and several thorn-studded palm trees. The TARDIS was still in her hiding place.

Sandra stood in front of the faux police box, regarding it. So much for perception filters, Ace thought, but then, since when had that ever worked?

“This wasn’t here the other day,” Sandra said. She was still dressed in the same filthy blue t-shirt she’d worn to the site. Her blonde hair was matted and dark with grease and mud. Her face was spotless. She looked to Ace for an answer, and Ace felt irrationally angered by the young woman’s utterly normalcy; her pretty face and the pretty life that represented.

Ace shoved that down. No one had a perfect pretty life, she knew that, and even if they did you couldn’t tell that by looking at them. Still, she was stressed over the Professor, and she was saucy in her reply:

“You sure it’s not a new outhouse?”

“That’s what I thought…” said Sandra. She stopped. Took a step back to give herself a better view. “But it’s so beautiful.”

Not: ‘but that would be impossible’, or ‘but why’d they do that?’ Ace should’ve had warning bells at that point, instead she just had pride:

“She is a bit, isn’t she?” said Ace. She stepped forward and stroked the side of the old wooden box. Home.

“Is it —she, yours?”

“Nah,” said Ace. “She’s the Professor’s. I just mooch around.” His name brought a twinge, because he was missing, and she should be getting on that, not standing around jawing. He’d be getting himself into trouble probably and needing his Ace-up-his-sleeve to rescue him. Then a thought occurred to Ace, a finger on her unease:

“You weren’t down here yesterday?” Ace asked Sandra, who still kept staring at the TARDIS, like the ship was the most marvellous thing she’d ever seen. Probably was, Ace thought, but there was no way she should know that just from the scuffed-up outside.

“You didn’t visit the outhouse, all of yesterday?” Ace prompted again when Sandra didn’t respond.

“Oh, what? No, of course I did, of course I did, but I didn’t notice. Anyway, I should get going. You should too if you want breakfast. We’re just washing pottery today though, so you don’t have to hurry for the trailer.”

Ace watched Sandra’s return to the main part of the camp with narrowed eyes. She kept her hand on the TARDIS, taking comfort from the faint buzz in the ship’s wooden exterior, the ever-present hum.

*

“Your girlfriend is dead creepy,” Ace told Hex.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Hex.

They were both sitting on up-turned buckets with water-filled bowls in their laps, washing the mud off bits of broken pottery with little toothbrushes and then setting them off on wire-frame racks to dry. Ace thought it was the most pointless, mind-numbing, finger-wrinkling chore she’d ever worked at. All she wanted was to race into the jungle and find the Professor and drag him back from whatever danger he’d fallen into. Past, future, aliens, whatever.

Instead she was here, scrubbing at smashed up bits of old pots because she didn’t know what to do or where to go. Mauss had looked at his students with vacant eyes and told them to wash artifacts. Ace wasn’t one of his students, but she hadn’t had the heart to argue.

“I was talking to Darryl over breakfast,” said Hex, his voice going quick and squeaky like it did when he was worried. “He thinks it might have been a sinkhole. Apparently this whole area is on top of limestone caves. There are these holes all over the place and —”

“No,” said Ace, pausing him with her voice. “It’s not a cave, it’s not a snake, it’s not — They’re still alive. Who went missing? José, who knows these woods. I mean look at him. And I was talking with people; he wasn’t even searching with the group. He was trying to get the tractor started again.”

“By himself,” Hex pointed out.

“Exactly, why would three people, not all in the same spot, one by the transport, all go missing?”

“I don’t know,” Hex admitted.

“Not slipping into a sinkhole that’s for bloody sure. And that’s another off thing, the tractor breaking down like that, again…”

“Darryl says that it breaks down all the time.”

“Probably,” said Ace. “The thing looks older than the Professor. Thing is though, according to the staff José used to go into the reserve land to poach when he was younger; he knows the jungle like the back of his hand. He grew up here. Lodge, she was surveying, wandering down trails, she wouldn’t get lost. And you saw her; she’s someone who can take care of herself. And the Professor can definitely take care of himself.”

“That’s debatable,” said Hex.

“Yeah, that’s true, but you know him, he doesn’t just vanish, well, he does, but this is weird.” Ace paused. It was weird, even by their shifting standards. And she was worried. But it was the Professor, and he always knew what to do. Except when he didn’t.

“So what is it then?” asked Hex.

“Gordon Bennet, Hex! You remember what happened on site, with the time; it’s that. It’s got to be. And then the Professor’s message —”

“But you said that the TARDIS hadn’t moved?”

“It’s all twisted in on itself, he’s fallen through something, and now he’s there and we’re here and we can’t go get him.”

“Why can’t we?” asked Hex.

Ace let the piece of pottery she was cleaning drop into her bowl of water. The millennium old artifact slowly broke into pieces and dissolved. Ace smiled. “Why can’t we?” she asked slowly.

“Wait,” said Hex. “No, wait, the Doctor said to wait.”

“The Doctor said to keep an eye out. Something’s going on and I’m going to get to the bottom of it, but if the Professor doesn’t come back on his own by the end of tomorrow we’ve got a date and we’ve got a time machine.” Ace’s eyes darkened. “He’s not always right you know, and when he isn’t —”

Hex finished for her, “— He needs us to watch his back.”

 

tbc


	6. Time

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.

John Archibald Wheeler

 

 

It was dark between times. Dark, and lost. Inky, like fingers, like nightmares, like death. Backwards sands through an hourglass; all those grains lined up against gravity. The effect would be nightmarish for a human and very possibly deadly. For a Time Lord, it was, in many ways worse, though perhaps not as dangerous.

“Hold on to yourselves!” the Doctor shouted, his voice twisted by temporal echoes. He strained to hold on to his own advice.

Who was he? Who —

What?

“I am…” he hissed through clenched teeth. “I am the… I am…”

But it was lost in the dark, not coming. He could hear the others screaming as the vortex shredded their souls. Perhaps they would live. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was all irrelevant. There was another with them; a malevolent being in the darkness, pulling on their shoulders, drawing them, him —

“Hold on…” the Doctor whispered, choking out the last thing he could remember before the darkness took him; “hold on… ace…”

*

Mauss was crouched in the curved-round trunk of the giant ceiba tree, alone, in brief sanctuary from the outside world. The ground was tacky with loam, and puddles, and dirt that wasn’t quite mud yet but would be.

It was nearing on 2 o’clock PM and the clouds were massing again, reflecting his mood. It was bad enough missing Brendan, worse, as far as scandals went. Losing a student was a sure way to get the field school funding cut, to get lawsuits filed, and review boards talking. Losing staff members was bad, but, from a professional viewpoint, they were adults and making their own choices. Technically Brendan, at nineteen, was an adult as well, and he’d signed the release forms, but he’d been under Mauss’ care. Shit would hit the fan.

José was relatively well off, and a known figure in his local community, but, when push came to shove, no one back home particularly cared about some random native getting lost in the jungle. It would be set aside as a foot note, an ‘oh, well isn’t that a shame’.

People would mourn Brendan, and Lodge; heads would fly over that, but no one would be railing for José. His family would mourn, his farm would go to the highest bidder, and Mauss just wanted to punch someone, or something.

He’d buy the land himself, give José’s family something to live on, but his salary wasn’t high. There’d been pay-cuts for all the universities after the war, and any saving he might have gathered had gone into keeping the field school running. Everything left over went to the veterans fund.

Nothing left to pay for emergencies. He should have known better. Somehow.

He knew he should be organizing another search, but he couldn’t shake the memories of the previous night and what had happened on the way back to the trailer, and after. Cig and Herbert were rounding people up instead, taking charge, doing what needed to be done.

Except, the jungle had gone bad, and Mauss didn’t think he was comfortable with them going out, even in the daylight. Something was off. His friend, his student, his co-worker, the lunatic tourist — they hadn’t just vanished; they’d been stolen.

He remembered:

Smooth, seamless night. The stillness of it. Searching for the crazy Scott. There’d been a flash of light through the dark which had sent Mauss reeling into a flashback and a place he never wanted to go back to. When he’d recovered he’d blinked away the photo-negative afterglow and the swirling black spots. It hadn’t been a grenade, because he could smell no burning, but it hadn’t been natural either and that’s when they’d realised Lodge was gone.

They’d all searched for hours, but the jungle gave up no secrets. Herbert tore through the bush in a frenzy to find his lost fiancé, putting away caution to the point where they had to physically pull him back before he got himself snake-bit or worse in his oblivion.

It had been the same smokeless flash with José on their way back. The tractor had nearly swerved off a cliff when he’d disappeared out of the driver’s seat, accompanied by the same blinding light and loud non-noise that left everyone's ears ringing.

Cig had saved them. Riding shot-gun on the tractor’s wheel cover, he’d managed to drop into place, jerk the steering wheel, and slam the breaks. They hadn’t stopped to look for José, and that tore up Mauss as much as anything. There’d been a fear, like a cattle prod, that made them run. Cig had gunned the engine and they’d driven away fast as the tractor could stand.

~

Back in the present, Mauss put his hands on the sides of his head and pressed. If he pressed hard enough, maybe he could crack his skull inwards and leave this crazy world, but he wasn’t suicidal and he didn’t try it. There’d been no flash of light for the Doctor.

There’d been no flash of light for Brendan either, but that hardly proved anything. It wasn’t like Brendan could be behind all of this. The Doctor, though, all the trouble had started with him showing up. Him and his friends, claiming to be researching a book when clearly they were doing no such thing.

Mauss would register the missing persons’ reports soon. If Cig and Herbert and their gang of local help came back empty-handed, he’d phone it in to the university and the government and get the real search parties going. Not that they would find anything; too much time had passed, and as an archaeologist Mauss knew better than most just how thoroughly the jungle covered its tracks.

The afternoon rain started slower than it had the day before; a gentle prelude of raindrops gradually building to a cascade. Mauss stood up from his crouch, slowly, stretching his back and feeling the muscles pull. He was sweaty under his unwashed clothing, but that didn’t matter. He walked through the rain back to camp. There were two people he needed to talk to, and they would answer his questions. Elsewise, he wasn’t sure what he would do.

He still really wanted to punch someone.

*

Hex and Ace were sitting out of the rain in the dinning area. A good portion of the remaining students had the same idea but, whether by plan or by unconscious instinct, they kept well to the other side of the shelter, giving the stranded time travellers their space.

The atmosphere was tense and the steady drum of rain on the shelter’s palm-frond roof only seemed to intensify the pressure. No one was talking. Ace gave eyes to the tractor out on the lawn. There was a gang of staff members and local help gathered around it, standing, chatting, in the rain. The would-be search party. The tractor gave a high-pitched rattle as, once again, Cig revved the engine, trying to get it to turn over.

It didn’t.

Ace wanted to go with them, Hex knew. He wasn’t entirely sure why she wasn’t down there with them already, nagging and badgering herself a position on the trailer. Even in the craziest kind of jungle, if anyone could find the Doctor it was Ace. Their connection was almost spooky sometimes.

“Ace?” Hex asked.

“It’s not going to work,” she said, still staring keenly at the would-be rescue team. “It won’t start; it doesn’t want them to look.” Her eyes were almost glowing, and there was something in the intensity of her glance that wasn’t quite —

“Ace,” said Hex, “you’re freaking me out here.”

He wondered if it was just in his head, but sometimes she didn’t seem completely human. He chalked up to her having travelled with the Doctor so long; that had to affect you in the long run, like eating lead or something. Still, it gave him the willies.

Ace blinked. “What?”

Hex didn’t respond. He only shook his head in frustration.

“There’s something really not right going on here,” Ace said.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

Ace shrugged, and their conversation settled back into silence.

So that was it then. They were just going to sit and wait for the Doctor to turn up again. Or not turn up again.

Hex squinted into the rain. “Oh, look, here comes trouble,” Hex said.

Mauss was coming across the lawn towards them. At first Hex thought he was going to join the crowd by the tractor, but he continued past the rescue party without and backwards glance and up the dinning area’s steps. He went direct to the bench Hex and Ace were sharing and stopped in front of them.

Mauss didn’t speak for a long time. He just stood there, staring at them.

“Hey, mate,” said Ace finally, “you’re blocking my view.”

“Who are you,” Mauss asked in a low, ice-on-gravel voice.

“Already said,” said Ace. “Hex and Ace, we’re here with the Professor researching a book, and we’re just as worried about —”

“NO,” said Mauss, and Hex felt himself flinch a bit at the shout. “No, you damn well aren’t, because if you were you’d have called ahead, arranged things up.”

“It was very sudden,” Hex butted in, feeling slightly queasy. He wondered if he could talk the man down or if he’d just put his foot in it. Ace had that gleam back in her eye though, and Hex couldn’t see an argument between her and Mauss going down well. The man looked like he was fast approaching the end of his rope, and Hex couldn’t blame him.

“You don’t know one damn thing about archaeology, do you?” raged Mauss. “Either of you?”

“I know the stuff comes out of the ground,” Ace quipped. Hex groaned.

“Who are you?” said Mauss, and Hex got the distinct impression that if the angry archaeologist didn’t get the right answer Bad Things were going to happen.

Mauss had deep eyes. Hex had seen eyes like that on other trauma nurses who’d done too many night shifts; Ace had eyes like that; the Doctor had invented eyes like that. It meant that the person behind them had seen too much and done too much.

Hex wondered if he was starting to look like that. He really, really hoped not.

“We’re time travellers,” Hex blurted out.

“Hex!” said Ace.

But there was no stopping him. There were too many lies floating around, the air was thick with them, or maybe that was just the humidity. And what was the worse that could happen?

Mauss burst out laughing. “Oh, right, I should have guessed. And you’re from Mars right? Tell me another one kid. Who do you think you’re kidding? I’m not messing around, I want to know where you came from and what you did with my people.”

“We didn’t do anything with your people,” said Ace. “Sheesh, how thick are you. We’ve been here the whole time. When could we have done anything?”

“Your Doctor friend, he didn’t explode.”

“The other people exploded!?” Hex yelped.

“They vanished in big flashes of light,” said Mauss.

“Like what?” asked Ace. “Fireworks? Lightning?”

“More like a flash grenade,” said Mauss.

Ace whistled appreciatively. “So, you think the kidnapper was trying to distract you then?” she asked.

“I don’t know what I think,” said Mauss. “Logically, none of this makes any fu—”

“Logic goes out the window with the Doctor, mate,” said Hex. “Believe me.”

“You show up and people disappear,” said Mauss. “What am I supposed to think? Maybe you’re human trafficers, maybe you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Story of my life,” Hex muttered. If Mauss heard he gave no indication. The look on Ace’s face told Hex that she’d been thinking the same.

“Whatever you are, you lied to me,” Mauss said, “and you lied to my team, and now they’re in danger and that’s not acceptable. So I’m asking again, and no getting smart: who are you? Because I know you and your Doctor friend have something to do with this.”

“Like Hex said,” said Ace, “time travellers.”

“She’s not lying,” Hex chipped in. “I mean, I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s true. Ace is from the sixties and…”

“Eighties,” corrected Ace. “Sheesh, Hex, I’m not that old.”

“You’re unbelievable,” said Mauss. His good hand tensed up like it was about to swing. “Don’t you realise that—”

And that was when Ace took control. Hex had seen her do it before, mostly after nudging from the Doctor, but it was still something. She had her own twist on it, but it was still his words through her mouth. That same vaguely condescending tone:

“— that people are missing?” said Ace. “That maybe they’re dead and maybe they’re alive, but your tractor won’t start so no one can go search and find out. That you’re afraid, ‘cause it’s your friends and don’t I realise what’s at stake? Let me say buster, the Doctor’s gone too and I don’t think you realise what that means.”

Mauss stared at Ace really intently. Like he was trying to see her soul, or something. It made Hex uncomfortable.

“You know what’s going on?” asked Mauss, his anger giving way to sarcasm. “Then do pray tell. Did you see it in your crystal ball?”

“I never said I knew what was going on,” said Ace, “only that our friend is missing too so could you lay off it a bit? We aren’t the bad guys, got it?”

“Then why are you here?” asked Mauss. “Because, going with your story, it strikes me that a run-down, half-ass funded archaeological field school looking at settlement patterns is a damn stupid place for a time traveller to go vacationing to. If you could go see Tikal, or Caracol, or Palenque at their height then why the hell would you want to watch excavations at an itty-bitty rural ritual centre?”

“That’s the Doctor for you,” said Hex, well aware that Mauss was still looking for a confession. “Neither of us is allowed in the driver’s seat.”

“The Doctor again,” said Mauss. “I can tell when things don’t fit together, that’s my job, and nothing you’re saying is —”

“He left us a message,” said Hex. “That tablet I found. That was him. You saw it, so, in your professional archaeological opinion, was it real or not?”

Mauss glanced over Ace and Hex’s shoulders to the centre of the dinning area where the tablet was still propped against a tree-stump bench. Mauss seemed to consider it for a long moment. The rain beat harder against the roof, came in sideways through the open-air wall. Mauss sighed, and it was nearly lost against the storm’s patter and hiss. His shoulders slumped. The worst of the rage went away. And he was just a tired forty-something man spattered with rain and dirt.

“By appearance it looks right, but it’s a big chunk of slate. You can’t date rocks like that; there’s no carbon, nothing organic, and even if there were the labs take months. I was unable to translate the glyphs, though I highly doubt that your name is anywhere on that slab, or that it was written as some kind of temporal message in a bottle. It proves nothing.”

“Are you thick or something?” asked Ace. “The Professor just about collapsed when Hex dug that thing up. That was right around when Brendan would have disappeared too. Did you think of that?”

Looking at his eyes, Hex could tell that Mauss had thought of that, and maybe, just maybe he was starting to believe — ?

“It’s nothing conclusive,” said Mauss, his voice suddenly cold and professional. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe your story and I still don’t like you, but I think you’re probably harmless. I’ll be calling in the disappearances if they can’t get the motor running. A trained search party might succeed in turning up something. You can hitch a ride into town with us when we relocate the students if you like, and you can find your own transport from there. If not, I’d advise you to leave before the authorities arrive. They don’t take kindly to unlicensed parties coming into reserve land.”

He waited for a response. He didn’t get one.

Ace stood up, and started walking away, out of the dinning area, into the rain. Hex gave Mauss the sincerest apologetic look he could manage and then shot off to follow her.

*

“That was a bit rude,” Hex said, panting a bit. Ace was a fast walker and with the head start he’d had to jog to catch up.

She grunted.

“Where are you going?”

“TARDIS,” she said.

“What for?”

“To get the Professor.”

“Ace…”

“Yeah, I know, we said we’d wait a bit, but I can’t stand it. It’s not right.”

“The Doctor —”

Ace stopped. They’d reached the edge of the lawn. Her face was back-dropped by jungle when she turned to look at Hex. Her eyes were bright. She was breathing harder than she should have been. The rain blurred her outline and made her hair curl where it had escaped its tie-back.

“He’s in trouble,” Ace said. “I can feel it. You should stay Hex. Keep an eye on things.”

Hex wanted to stay. It would be safer, most definitely, than whatever Ace had in mind. “I’m coming with you.”

“Hex!”

“You watch the Doctor’s back, and I watch yours.”

“I don’t need anyone to watch my back, Hex.”

She didn’t say “least of all you” but Hex heard it in her tone. It was true, probably.

“Everyone needs someone,” he said. Not because he believed it — though he did a bit — but because it seemed the right thing to say.

Ace grunted again, turned, and started along the outhouse path to the TARDIS.

“So, can you fly the TARDIS at all even?” Hex asked. “Only, the Doctor seems to keep that to himself, and he isn’t that good at it even…”

“All you got to do is put in the coordinates and pull the lever, Hex. The Doctor likes to make a show of it. It’s not really that hard.”

“If you say so… how many time you done it before?”

“…a couple. Sort of.”

Hex gulped. He could still turn back, but the alternative wasn’t that much better when he thought about it clearly: marooned in Central America forty years in his relative future, without a passport. Even an alien planet or a crash landing in the distant past might be better. At least then he wouldn’t have to deal with customs.

The ripe smell of the outhouses shook Hex out of his thoughts. There was the TARDIS, nestled in her thorny grove. Ace was already inside. Hex hurried to catch up.

She was standing over the console, her finger poised above a switch. She chewed her lip in concentration.

“I think…” she said.

Hex leaned up against a wall. The roundels were cool against his sweat-stuck shirt back. It seemed so white, so fresh, after all that green. It was still humming though, but the TARDIS hum was better than the jungle hum Hex thought: less “I want to suck your blood” and more “there are extra pillows in the closet, and food in the fridge”.

Ace continued dawdling over the console. She didn’t know, Hex realised. Or she did, but she wasn’t sure.

“What was the date again?” she asked.

The door, which Hex hadn’t fully closed, cracked open. Ace swung around to meet the intruder.

“I’ll be damned,” said Mauss. He gawked for half a moment before switching to a pose which said that he was interested, surprised, and admitting confusion, but not at all impressed. “This means your story’s true then?”

Hex nodded. Ace just about smiled, but it was one of her cat smiles and Hex wasn’t sure if she was amused or still angry. She had one hand on the door toggle and the other on her hip.

“Welcome to the Twilight Zone mate,” said Hex.

“Told you so,” said Ace, giving a real smile, one that made Hex wonder if she hadn’t planned this.

Mauss licked his lips nervously. His deformed hand clenched and unclenched. He looked back over his shoulder at the jungle outside. He looked at Hex and Ace. He looked hard at Ace.

He seemed to come to a conclusion. “Then you can take me to them,” Mauss said. “The date you want, the one on the glyph, it was 4 Lamat 1 Kankin. That’s the 10th of June, 819AD. If you’re right, if that’s where they are, then you can take me there right now, and I can get them back.”

“This isn’t a taxi service,” said Ace.

“That wasn’t a request,” said Mauss.

“What she means is thanks for the offer and thanks for the date,” said Hex, “but…”

“It wouldn’t be right giving you a trip without the Doctor’s permission,” said Ace. “Sorry.”

Hex had an idea that it had between a little bit and nothing to do with the Doctor’s permission, but he kept his mouth shut.

“You might know about all this,” said Mauss. He waved his half-hand at the console room. “But after a day and a half of you two tripping around I know that neither of you knows squat about the jungle, or where you’re planning on going, if you can even get there. You need me, and I need to find my people. Understood?”

The ultimatum hung heavy in the space between the jungle and the white. The hums melded and ran together for a twisted moment, careened to a furious pitch. Then subsided.

“Understood,” said Ace. She flipped the door toggle and the jungle was cut away.

“Welcome to the good ship TARDIS,” Hex said. Ace pushed a few buttons and pulled a lever.

“May I suggest you hang on to something?”

 

tbc


	7. Space

_To some [the human skull] resembles a bowling ball, and there is a compulsion to insert one's fingers into the eye orbits or sockets.  
  
THIS NEVER SHOULD BE DONE._   
  
Bass, Human Osteology: Laboratory and Field Manual  
  
  
  
  
  
Red light, warm, glowing.   
  
The Doctor came back to consciousness on his back. His face was unreasonably warm and the light was bright even through his firmly closed lids. There was an incessant and obnoxious ringing in his ears, and, past that, the world beyond his body seemed to be humming and droning all on its own.   
  
An insect of some sort landed on his face, bombinating loudly. The Doctor twitched his nose and the many-legged invader flew away with an angry buzz. Slowly, the Doctor took stock:   
  
Arms, legs, fingers, toes — all intact. He didn’t seem to have any major internal or external injuries even if he did feel as if he’d been run upside-down through the untempered schism itself. His whole body was aching. His head felt stuffed with something that wasn’t cotton wool; steel wool maybe?   
  
Slowly, he opened his eyes, and squinted.  
  
The sky directly above was blue from end to end with no clouds, no muzz, just blue. The sun was a white coruscating dot. The Doctor managed to pull his slow moving thoughts together enough to wonder if he’d been sunburned. That would explain the warm soreness of his face if nothing else.  
  
He reached out an experimental hand. Yes, the skin over his cheeks and nose did feel tender.  
  
With a grunt, he managed to sit up for a more comprehensive survey of his surroundings. He was still dizzy and having trouble putting one thing in front of another, but basic reasoning had come back, as had his name, and that was very good. Then it hit him:  
  
There were no trees.  
  
The jungle was gone.  
  
That fact was enough to send the Doctor staggering to his feet. He took a deep breath and tried to focus his temporal and spatial senses. He was, he felt sure, standing in the same coordinates as he’d been previously. He hadn’t moved, physically at least. But time had shifted and, for all intents and purposes, he was somewhere else.  
  
He stood at the summit of a low hill, one of many, all of them with their sides carved into long terraces held in place by low stone walls. Beneath his feet there was dust-dry earth, short clumps of yellowed vegetation, and a crunchy mixture of broken pottery, chalk, and ash. In every direction it was the same. The Doctor could make out ditches criss-crossing the flat land between slopes. He presumed them to be man-made irrigation cannels, but there was no water running in them and any crops they might have supported were long dead.  
  
The whole area looked dead.   
  
There were little shabby looking dwellings spotted along the hills, but they all looked abandoned and burnt out. The only significant construction, far as the eye could see, was a small cluster of buildings laid out at the base of the hill the Doctor stood on. He peered down at it, interest fighting with wool, and a great desire for sleep.  
  
There were four, and they were small, huts really, made of mud and thatch; they couldn’t have had more than a room apiece. They wouldn’t have been any different from the other sad little dwellings scattered across the waste land if each hadn’t been perched on a separate, white-washed, miniature pyramid. The four mounds were arranged around a small central plaza which also gleamed with fresh white plaster.  
  
A large fire blazed beside the complex, and people scrambled across the plaza. They seemed to be adding more plaster to the pyramids and white-washing the huts that sat on them. A group near the eastern edge worked to erect a large, intricately carved block of limestone.  
  
“That’s interesting…” said the Doctor as he looked at the site which would, some millennia later, be designated as site R-506. “That’s very interesting…”  
  
He stooped to pick up his hat and brolly from where they had fallen, shaken off during the fall. He brushed them off, pushed the panama on low to shade his eyes from the glaring sun, looped the brolly over the cleft of his elbow.  
  
And started down the hill.  
  
*  
  
Ace really hoped that she knew what she was doing. She’d been travelling with the Doctor for almost longer than she could remember, and by now she’d maybe spent more time onboard the TARDIS than she had on Earth growing up. She’d watched the Professor fly and launch and land, and she’d even driven herself a few times under the strictest supervision, or, once, following detailed directions ink-scrawled onto a sheet of pig parchment.  
  
But she’d never gone solo charting her own course.   
  
The console room lurched, but it wasn’t a _bad_ lurch. There were always lurches, hiccups —  
  
Turbulence.  
  
It knocked them all off their feet. Ace went into an undignified sprawl against the floor, only to have Hex, who’d been unsuccessfully trying to brace himself against a wall, belly flop on top of her. Mauss had slightly more luck at staying upright by clutching at the coat rack, until it flipped over and took him with it.  
  
“Oh, bollocks,” Ace said, her voice rather muffled by Hex’s chest.  
  
The room shook. The lights flickered. Ace could hear the vortex howling. She shoved off Hex who was giving a steady chant of “Oh my god… oh my god…” and hauled herself to her feet. She staggered to the console.  
  
She didn’t know what she was doing. The readings were all over the place and she couldn’t read half a quarter of them. She’d been an idiot to try this, she knew. She should have heeded the Doctor’s warning. She should have stayed in one place. He’d had it all figured out, probably, another one of his grand schemes, and now she was just going to muck it up. She was good at that.  
  
“Oh my god… oh my god…” Hex continued as the lights went out, and stayed out, for fully a minute before coming back at half strength. The console room was painted sickly yellow by their flickering glow. The roundels seemed to slide and contract with each queasy lurch.  
  
“Have some faith,” Ace shouted at Hex, trying for a good natured jib to calm him down. “I’m not completely clueless. We’ve just hit a rough patch is all.” She leaned in close until her nose nearly touched the vibrating control panel.  
  
“Come on, old girl,” she whispered. “Give me a bit of a hand, please. For the Doctor’s sake?”  
  
The TARDIS continued to shake. Faster, faster, faster — the ship was vibrating and churning and flickering. Screaming in protest against whatever outside forces had seized control.   
  
And then it stopped.  
  
In the eerie quiet that followed, Mauss and Hex pulled themselves off the floor.  
  
“Is that it then?” asked Hex.  
  
Ace looked at the console display, trying to make sense of the mix of Gallifreyan, Greek, and Arabic maths. Whenever she managed to focus the bizarre mash of numerals into some kind of coherence, the pattern would shimmer and rearrange. She wondered how the Doctor ever made any sense of it.  
  
“Looks like,” Ace said. She hit the door toggle switch.  
  
“It’s not usually that bumpy,” Hex confided to Mauss as they exited.  
  
“I’ve had trailer rides that were worse,” said the archaeologist.  
  
“I believe it,” said Hex.  
  
Ace ignored them. She patted the console once, gently. “Thanks,” she whispered, before joining her companions outside.  
  
It was still jungle; dark, lush green. Rain came down steadily. There weren’t many drops, but they were big when they hit; half a dozen were enough to leave you soaked. The sound of water bouncing from leaf to leaf filled the air. The outhouse was nowhere to be seen.  
  
“Right,” said Ace. “Told you I could do it. We’ve moved.”  
  
“But where to?” asked Hex.  
  
“To where the Doctor is,” said Ace. “Hopefully…” She took a few steps, low leafs of undergrowth clung to her ankles. Somewhere far off a monkey howled.  
  
“This is wrong,” said Mauss.  
  
“What’s wrong,” asked Ace, deflating.  
  
“You took a wrong turn,” said Mauss. “I don’t know where this is or what your carnival trick is, but this isn’t 819AD. There was a drought then, and this is a good early rainy season shower. Wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same rain I just stepped out of.”  
  
Ace took a deep breath. The air smelled of manure, loam, and ozone. She had to agree that not much seemed to have changed. But then, it was jungle. Jungle could be the same backwards or forwards, couldn’t it?  
  
“Maybe we’re only a few years off?” Hex said.  
  
Mauss scowled. He started stamping through the brush, looking keenly at various trees and broken twigs. “That’s invasive Cocos nucifera nova,” he said, tapping the trunk of a towering palm. “things weren’t bio-engineered until the early 2040s and now ten years gone they’re all over the damn place. Whatever way you’ve taken us Madam Ace it ain’t past-ward.”  
  
Ace looked up at the interlacing tree branches overhead. She wanted to disagree, but what could she do? Call names like a kid? Stick out her tongue? It wasn’t like she could argue the point without proof.   
  
“In fact…” said Mauss, rubbing his hand over the palm he’d identified. He sniffed again, and turned in a slow circle. “That fern’s my pee spot,” he said.  
  
“What?” asked Hex, who was, predictably, standing right in front of said giant fern. He looked at his feet. “I stepped in it! Again!”  
  
“You’re hopeless,” said Ace.  
  
“It’s on my shoe! Don’t laugh! It’s not funny.”  
  
“I’m not laughing,” said Ace. She wasn’t really. She was smiling, because it was funny, and it was Hex, and okay, she was having a snigger, but the implications were hard.  
  
“That means the site’s just this way,” said Mauss. He started walking away through the undergrowth, following a trail that only he could see. Ace followed, so did Hex.  
  
In under two minutes they stepped out of the jungle and into a familar ash floored clearing. Four low mounds covered by tarps marked the boundaries.  
  
“Back in R-506,” said Mauss. He walked to the middle of the site plaza and stood very still. His shoulders slumped, and he sagged like a scarecrow with a broken post.   
  
“Do you think he’s okay?” Hex whispered in Ace’s ear.  
  
“No,” said Ace.  
  
“Are you okay?” asked Hex.  
  
“I’m fine,” said Ace. She turned and started walking back towards the jungle. “I just need to…”  
  
She was tense. The cat inside her was tense and waiting to scream at the wind. Ace took a deep breath to steady herself, but the dense scent of the wild only made the cat stronger. Ace took a few steps forward, then a few steps more, pushing past Hex. She could smell something beyond the overlaying odours of cow shit and rain. Time was out there and it was calling to her. She broke into a jog.  
  
“Hey, you don’t want to do that,” said Mauss from behind. “Watch where you’re going.”  
  
Ace didn’t heed the advice. She re-entered the jungle at a sprint. She was watching. She could see every detail of every plant. The rain fell in slow motion. She heard every drop hit. She heard the clouds shifting far overhead. A flock of parrots perched in a nearby tree, fluffed against the downpour. They shrieked as Ace ran past.  
  
“I think you should listen,” Hex panted, doggedly tagging her. “Slow down. We don’t know what’s out here.”  
  
“It’s calling me,” said Ace. Her skin seemed to crawl with the urge to move.   
  
She stopped for a moment to consider, whipping her head in a circle and flaring her nostrils to the storm. It was raining harder now, and the path was blurred.  
  
Thorns, bramble, bamboo, smooth wood, green —  
  
“It’s this way,” she said, catching the scent. She pushed aside vines and giant ferns as she followed the trail.  
  
“What’s this way?” asked Hex, yelping a bit at the end of his sentence. He’d hit a thorn with his shin.   
  
Ace could smell the blood. It tingled. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to follow it. You should stay back Hex.”  
  
“Ow, no, just slow down. You can’t just charge around through the brush like this. It isn’t safe.”  
  
“You should have stayed back at the camp Hex,” Ace said.  
  
“Not a chance. ‘Cause you acting all mad just further proves how much you need —”  
  
“Need what, Hex?” asked Ace. She came to a sudden stop. Hex almost ploughed into her, but managed to pull up in time.  
  
It was just another patch of jungle, nothing extraordinary, but this was the place. Ace was certain now. Just trees and dirt and tropical rain, but it _felt_ different. She was getting pins and needles all up and down her calves just from standing there. It was _waiting_.  
  
“Need your dosage checked probably,” said Hex. He leaned over, breathing hard, and examined the cut on his shin. It wasn’t serious, barely a scratch. “So where are we then?” he asked.  
  
“Don’t know,” said Ace. She tried to taste the air again, but the cat had gone back to its hiding place, and she wasn’t sure if she should be frustrated or relieved about that. “It’s weird it —”  
  
She took a hesitant step, trying to figure out the disjointed kaleidoscope her instincts were feeding her. Then the ground gave way, opened.   
  
She fell.  
  
  
 _tbc_


	8. Beyond

  
_Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been._  
  
Jim Bishop  
  
  
  
  
  
“Ace!” Hex shouted. He crouched over the narrow fissure she’d vanished into. “Oh, god, she’s gone. Ace, are you down there?”  
  
There was a long moment with no response. Hex felt his heart sink further with each passing second, like he was being swallowed by the earth himself. He might very well be soon enough, considering. His breath stuck half way up his throat.  
  
He’d lost Ace. He’d lost the Doctor. He’d lost Ace. Oh, god.  
  
“Yeah, I’m here,” Ace said, and Hex jumped at her voice. It was echo-y and distorted, but it was her. “Sink hole, right? I got caught halfway down.”  
  
“Do you think you can get back out?” said Hex, trying to pitch his voice to disguise the evidence of his freak out. He was still freaking out a bit, slightly.  
  
“Maybe.”   
  
Hex heard scrambling and heavy breathing. He strained to see down the hole, but he couldn’t make out anything past the first metre or so of chalky dirt; After that it was just black.  
  
“I think so,” Ace called up. “But wait, it widens out down here. If I just… Ow!”  
  
“Ace!” Hex shouted, his stomach taking another wild dip. He dropped to all fours and all but straddled the hole. “Ace!”   
  
He was forced to scramble back when the edges started crumbling under his fingers. His fedora fell off in the rush and tumbled into pit.   
  
The lack of answer, the rain pounding on his back and dripping down to slosh into his socks, the darkness that could conceal anything — it was all playing bloody havoc with his nerves. Hex’s nurse imagination took every possible bad outcome of a pained shout followed by nothing. The hole seemed to laugh at him.  
  
“I’m okay,” Ace said, and Hex remembered to breath. She paused for a long moment. “There’s just a bit of a drop. Wow, Hex, you should see this.”  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“It’s amazing. It just goes on and on. It’s like there’s a whole other world down here. You should come down.”  
  
“I’d rather not, thanks. Why don’t you come back up? We can go back to the TARDIS and get some dry…”  
  
“But Hex, don’t you see? I bet this is where the Doctor went. It has to be.” Her voice got smaller as she apparently moved further away from the sinkhole entrance. “Oh, man, it’s massive.”  
  
“I thought you said it wasn’t a sinkhole,” said Hex. “That the Doctor didn’t just fall down a hole.”  
  
“This isn’t just a hole, Hex. Come down here. You have to see this.”  
  
“I’m going to go get Mauss.”  
  
“No, don’t do that. He’ll probably just flip out again.”  
  
“Ace, we can’t just leave him wandering around while we go off spelunking. We should never have let him in the TARDIS in the first place. He needs help. I think losing his friend has really sent him off his rocker. He was way too calm about the whole time and space thing.”  
  
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t the one to let him in the TARDIS. He kind of pushed his own way in. Anyway, Hex, he knows his way around. Besides, that search and rescue party will be out soon enough to pick him out. Come on. You really have to see this. You won’t believe it.”  
  
“I should go back to the TARDIS first, get ropes, flashlights.”  
  
“Oh, come on, Hex, don’t be such a wuss. Stop making excuses. It’s an easy climb, and you don’t need a flashlight once you’re down here. It’s — you won’t believe it.”  
  
“All right, all right,” Hex said reluctantly. He peered into the dark crevasse one last time, trying to make anything out in the depths, before turning around and dangling his feet over the void.  
  
“This is really tight,” Hex protested as he wormed his way down, fighting off the waves of claustrophobia that kept threatening to immobilize him. He had to struggled to keep his grip on the rain washed limestone. “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”  
  
“Oh, come on, Hex, it’s not that bad. It widens out pretty fast.”  
  
“Yeah, it does a bit. I still don’t like this though — oaff.”  
  
“I did warn you about the drop,” said Ace.   
  
Hex slowly got to his feet. His knees had been grazed through his trousers by the fall and he was covered in pale streaks where damp limestone chalk had rubbed off on his body and clothes.   
  
He glared at Ace. She held out his now very wet and rumpled fedora as a peace offering.  
  
“Professor’s not going to be happy about you busting up his wardrobe like this,” she said.  
  
“He only wears the one hat.”  
  
“True, but he _likes_ his other clothes.”  
  
“Yeah, I’ve seen the wardrobe, haven’t I? You could write a paper on it, him collecting all that and then only wearing the same outfit all the time. Does he have multiples or is he just really sneaky? Because I’ve never seen him in the wash room… what?”  
  
Ace’s hair elastic had been ripped out by a bramble during her run and her wet-black hair was sticking all along her face. Whatever it was that had possessed her to race through the brush had apparently gone. She was smiling her patent “oh, Hex” smile at him; the one that meant he was missing something really obvious.  
  
Finally the penny dropped.  
  
“What is it?” Hex asked, his words punctuated by raindrops washed through the sinkhole and other bits of water drip-dripping off their saturated clothing. “Wait. Where’s all the light coming from?”  
  
“Look around,” said Ace.  
  
But Hex already was. His gaze had drifted past his friend to the scenery beyond. He staggered slightly, trying to get a grip on their surroundings. He’d been expecting dark and gloomy, but this, this…  
  
“It’s the walls. They’re all glowy, and, oh, Ace, you’re right; it is huge. It just goes on and on.”  
  
“Told you so,” she said.  
  
“It’s beautiful.”  
  
Hex stood awhile, just trying to take it all in. They were on a balcony ledge overlooking a great open space. Rock twisted and flowed and dripped in milky ribbons that would make Escher proud. Everything was illuminated by bright blue-white phosphorescence that seemed to ooze out of the very stones they stood upon. It looked like something out of a dream.  
  
Hex felt rather as if he was floating, and took a quick step back from the edge, pressing his back against the relative safety of the cave wall.  
  
“It’s something, isn’t it?” said Ace. “There’s a path down that way,” she said, pointing to a narrow track that led away from their balcony before spiralling into the wonderland beneath.  
  
“But where are we?”  
  
“Dunno. Maybe it’s one of those limestone caves that’s supposed to be under the jungle.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Hex, “except…”  
  
“Except?” Ace prodded, and Hex knew full well that she was thinking the same as him.  
  
“Well, it doesn’t seem natural does it? I mean, I’m no expert, but all that space, with no supports, shouldn’t it fall down or something?”  
  
“It should, shouldn’t it?” said Ace. “And there’s something else.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“We weren’t on a hill, were we? Before coming down here?”  
  
“It’s hard to tell with the trees, but I don’t think so, why?”  
  
“Well look at it, the ceiling. It’s higher than the jungle floor, wouldn’t you say?”  
  
Hex peered out across the cavern, tilting his vision upwards. He wasn’t a great judge of distance, but —  
  
“I think you’re right,” he said. He swallowed. Even pressed up against the wall all that space seemed to be calling for him, like it would reach out and grab him if he got too close. It was beautiful all right, but it was wrong. He glanced at the hole they’d both come through. It would take a bit of scrambling against the wall to climb back out, but they could do, and without any ropes like Ace had said.  
  
“We should go.”  
  
“Oh, come on, Hex, aren’t you the least bit curious?”  
  
“Not really, no. This place gives me the willies.”  
  
“Scardy-cat.”  
  
“Am not. I just don’t like being underground, and I don’t like being on the edge of a great big scary cliff either, and I really don’t fancy that path you’re trying to lead me down. It’s all slanted like that, one slip and you’d be a puddle on the floor down there.”  
  
“Hex, come on. This is our best chance of finding the Doctor.”  
  
“You really think that? Because the message he gave told us to stay put, and I’m thinking we should have. You’ve been acting like I don’t know what.”  
  
“Found this place, didn’t I?”  
  
“Yeah, you did, but that’s weird too. How’d you know it was here?”  
  
“I dunno, just knew. Oh, Hex, come on.”  
  
Without waiting she started down the narrow path, and, with nothing better to do, Hex followed. He leaned heavily against the wall, trying not to look down as the trail went through several switchbacks.  
  
“Not so bad is it?” said Ace.  
  
“Oh, ‘not so bad’, she says. But, yeah, it’s not so bad.”  
  
“Told you so.”  
  
They hit bottom faster than Hex thought they would, given the length of the path. It felt different at the base, removed. Probably that was something to do with differences in air pressure, or maybe it was just the general creepiness of everything.  
  
Hex cast his vote for creepiness.   
  
The floor of the cave was perfectly smooth, like poured cement, except white, and imbued with that same strange light. Hex looked up, and swallowed.  
  
“You can’t even see the roof from down here. It’s a good thing you fell through over that ledge,” he observed out loud, “otherwise…”  
  
“Yeah, had crossed my mind, but I’d rather not think about it, thanks,” said Ace.  
  
“Or me,” said Hex. He waited a minute. They both did.   
  
The bottom of the cave didn’t give Hex the same intense agoraphobic response the balcony had, even with the ceiling vanishing into a blur of white light far over head. Down at the cavern floor it was still a huge open space, but it was more like being street level in some alien town. Blocks of twisted limestone stood like windowless shops and offices along paths broken up by frequent bridges and aqueducts.   
  
Hex could almost forget where the were, and pretend that it was some alien landscape they were exploring, except that the air had a nasty wet, underground smell; a mix of decaying things, basements, and stagnant air. That, and there was quite a bit of sludgy jungle loam strewn across the rocks, fallen from the world above.  
  
It crunched underfoot as they walked.  
  
“What’s next then?” asked Hex.  
  
“We find the Doctor,” said Ace.  
  
“Where?” asked Hex. His voice sounded empty against the rocks, lost. He spoke louder than he meant to as a result. “I don’t know if you haven’t noticed, but it’s huge down here and we don’t exactly have a map. We don’t even know he’s really down here.”  
  
“He isn’t down here,” said Ace.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I don’t know, it’s just the way I feel. He’s down here, but he isn’t. It’s related, somehow. Come on.”  
  
“Which way.”  
  
“Any way, this way.” Ace started striding off into the surrealist landscape of pallid, glowing stone. “Hex, at least try to keep up.”  
  
“I’m coming, I’m coming.”  
  
He followed her through the corkscrew alleyways and plazas, the lump in his gut growing with every step. The back of his neck prickled with unseen eyes, but when he looked there was no one there.   
  
“Ace,” he said softly. “I have this weird feeling like we’re being watched.”  
  
He expected her to laugh and tell him to stop being paranoid. Instead, she said:  
  
“No, Hex, I feel it too. And not just watched; I think we’re being followed.”  
  
“Oh, my god.”  
  
“Quit Hex. Just keep going, pretend like you don’t notice.”  
  
“Oh, ‘pretend like you don’t notice’ she says.” Hex stepped on a bit of dried twig and the snap echoed like a gunshot. He jumped and yelped. Ace hardly flinched —  
  
but she did a bit, and Hex seized onto that. She was still human. Even when she went freaky on him, she was still Ace, Dorothy, and damn he wished he could understand that. He tried to keep his eyes on her back because the flowing patterns in the limestone blocks they were passing made him think of screaming faces.  
  
“Come on, Hex. There’s a draft, don’t you feel it? There’s got to be an exit nearby yeah?”  
  
“I guess, but —”  
  
“Then no worries, this way.”  
  
She started clambering over a pile of rocks. They reminded Hex of fallen Roman columns. The kind with fancy swirls at the top. Ionic was it? Or Corinthian? The Doctor would know straight off, Hex thought. Not that it mattered, because they weren’t really Roman columns, just bits of funny shaped rock. Not that it wouldn’t surprise him if they were. One thing he’d learned lately was that anything could, and likely would, happen.  
  
He still had the feeling of eyes on his back, and that gave him the chills.  
  
As Hex surmounted the pile, he heard a scrapping noise, like claws on gravel. He looked over his shoulder in the direction of the sound. Nothing. Ace was scrambling down the rocks in front of him. True to what she had said, there was an opening in the cave wall, not far ahead, and on the other side was a blessing glimpse of blue and green.  
  
Hex ignored the creepy and followed Ace, going maybe a bit faster than he should have on the uneven terrain. He paused when he heard the scrapping again. It would be easy to put it down to rocks shifting, to Ace’s footsteps echoing back across the cavern, except that now Ace was standing still too. She was poised on the end of a long, pillar-like rock, cocking her head at an odd angle, no doubt trying to pick up a better volume on the sound.  
  
She looked back over her shoulder at Hex, and her expression was grim. The flicker in her eye said that she could see something coming up behind him. Hex could feel its hot breath on his neck. He forced himself not to look, stealing courage from the same deep down reserves that had helped him face down full moon night shifts back when he worked A &E. He readied himself for whatever was going to happen next, fight or flight. He had a good idea of what was coming, even if he didn’t know the specifics.  
  
“Hex,” Ace said in a gritty whisper, “When I say run —”  
  
She didn’t finish. The rock pile started to collapse under the weight of the creature. Hex ran/slid/fell after Ace.   
  
Together they rushed towards freedom, pursued by a long, cat-like howl.  
  
  
 **End of episode two**  
  
  
 _tbc_


	9. Episode Three

**Episode Three**  
  
  
 _Forms and types, that is, products, have been regarded as more real and alive than the society which created them and whose needs determined these manifestations of life._  
  
A.M. Tallgreen  
  
  
  
  
  
“Hex,” Ace said in a gritty whisper, “when I say run —”  
  
She didn’t finish. The rock pile started to collapse under the weight of the creature. Hex ran/slid/fell after Ace. Together they rushed towards freedom, pursued by a long, cat-like howl.  
  
Their feet slid over the scree and wind-brushed loam at the cave mouth. It exited onto a crater, and it was a steep slope upwards to the jungle proper. The face was covered with bent trees, growing sideways from the incline. Ace grabbed at branches to speed her flight, slicing her palms pretty badly on the thorns. She could hear Hex doing the same behind her.  
  
They surmounted the edge, and paused there, panting. The howls had stopped, and Ace’s gut told her that they were safe, at least for the meanwhile.  
  
“What,” asked Hex, hands on knees between breaths, “was that.”  
  
“I really have no idea,” said Ace, “but I don’t think it was friendly.”  
  
“No, really?” said Hex. “And now it’s between us and the TARDIS. Great plan that was.”  
  
“Oi.”  
  
“Anyways,” said Hex. He traced a scratch on his hand, wincing. “Any idea of where we are?”  
  
Ace sniffed the wind, but couldn’t catch anything. It all looked like jungle to her, except— “It’s dry here,” she said.  
  
“You’re right,” said Hex. He lifted his foot and brought it down. They both listened to the crackle of dried leaves snapping and giving way to dust. “It hasn’t rained here.”   
  
Ace squinted at the sky. It was blue beyond measure with no hint of fog, or cloud, or pollution blown in from distant cities. She tasted the air again and it was _clean_ , and dry, with a hint of wood smoke. And blood. She could taste it. In her mouth.  
  
No.  
  
That was a long time ago. She’d got over it. The Professor had hypnotised it out of her. Why was it all coming back now?  
  
She wondered if that meant that he was dead. Instantly she refuted the thought, because it broke too many paradigms. She closed her eyes and saw him smiling at her over the handle of his umbrella, a secret finger poised ‘shhh’ over his lips. The universe couldn’t exist if he wasn’t in it. She couldn’t exist.  
  
“And there are none of those trees Mauss was on about,” said Hex, breaking her thoughts.  
  
“What?”  
  
“The ones he was pointing at, coco something, with the smooth bark and the nuts and stuff. There aren’t any.”  
  
“Since when are you the expert botanist?”  
  
“Hey, don’t believe me if you want, there aren’t any, though.”  
  
“Maybe there aren’t any in this square metre of forest, Hex, that hardly proves —”  
  
“No, but it’s dry too, you saw that. I said that cave was freaky. And then that thing. And you going all weird, and you did it again just now too, don’t think I didn’t notice — but, Ace, I think that maybe we aren’t in Kansas anymore.”  
  
Ace looked briefly at the too-dry vegetation before turning her eyes again to the sky. She felt cold suddenly, her damp clothing clammy against her skin even though the jungle was far warmer than the cave.  
  
“I think you might be right, Hex,” she said quietly.  
  
They walked a bit further in silence, following the instinct to put space between themselves and the cave. Hex was right, she didn’t want to admit it, but the cavern had been freaky. Unnatural. And that creature —  
  
Ace wasn’t scared easy, and she rarely admitted it when she was, but that thing had _looked_ at her, and into her, and, worst of all, she knew exactly what it had seen. Her pace increased at the memory. She pushed past another crackling wall of brownish leaves only to come to a sudden halt.  
  
The wooded verge around the cave and crater was only hundred or so metres deep. Beyond it was desert.  
  
*  
  
Mauss sat hard in the dirt, mud really. He could feel the water seeping up through the seat of his pants. They’d wandered off; the two British tourists. He could see their impossible blue box if he squinted through the ferns.  
  
He groaned and looked away. Back to the mounds, and the screens. The exactly measured off units so intricately set up only the day before. One last look before it was all taken down and reclaimed by jungle. Now that it had been mapped the site would probably be looted by the end of year. Reserve land and international treaties wouldn’t stop nature taking its course. The past would hold her secrets; they’d be scattered through dirty digging, decay, and foreign art markets. Nothing recorded.  
  
Some poor farmer would turn a profit from it, hopefully.  
  
There were chipped bits of broken ceramic on the ground, nothing special. Just brown crumbling clay. Scattered outside of the unit marker lines, they’d never have been collected and catalogued even if this hell hadn’t broken lose to ruin everything. Mauss clutched a palm-sized piece between his fingers, feeling the weight.  
  
Who made this, he wondered, what did they think about while they worked the clay. Did they realise their simple pot would still exist — even in fragments — long after moisture and ants had chewed their bones to soft rot.  
  
It all ended.  
  
Mauss had always known it was too good to last. He’d got off tour with his injury, gone back to school, carved a new life just as the world started settling. Everything was new for awhile. In the jungle everything was new, and old, ancient, days before death.  
  
Damn it. He wished. He wished. You could wish forever but that wouldn’t make something true.  
  
He stood up and walked over to the blue box, pushing past dripping vines and sodden tree trunks. When he put his hand to its side he felt nothing but wood. The light on top was flickering mournfully, but soon, even that went out. The rain had stopped, for the moment, but the jungle still seemed to weep with its weight of water, and dead dreams.  
  
Mauss heard the muffled roar of the tractor stalling a long way off. So, Cig had managed to get it going after all. That was something, but it wouldn’t help.  
  
They weren’t going to find José, or Lodge, or Brendan, and the three tourists were gone as well, vanished into the green. Mauss knew this, it was as if there was something on his mind, pressing it in —  
  
It was time to go.  
  
He turned and started walking down the trail to greet his rescuers. He’d have to put up with them staging another search, he wouldn’t be able to stop them — wasn’t his right anyways. He’d wait in the trailer for that bit.  
  
Then they’d take everything down and go back to camp, call up the vans to evacuate the students. He’d have to make middle-of-the-week hotel reservations for them, help with rebooking their return flights. There’d be a lot of paper work.   
  
He’d put the last line on it by leaving this place forever.  
  
*  
  
“Where’d all the trees go?” asked Hex. He stood next to Ace at the jungle’s edge. “I know slash-and-burn, but this — it’s like the whole rainforest is just gone. All the way out to the horizons. Gone.”  
  
“Someone chopped it down, obviously,” said Ace. She did that air-sniffing thing again, it was really beginning to freak Hex out, but he didn’t bother mentioning it. He didn’t think Ace was even completely aware of what she was doing any more.  
  
“But why, and why did they leave it all around the cave mouth?”  
  
“Probably because of that cat-thing that was chasing us, Hex-y.”  
  
That made sense. It also made Hex unconsciously edge himself a little further from the tree line.  
  
“We’re pre-industrial,” Ace said. “No pollution, but someone’s burning something over that hill.” She pointed.  
  
Hex squinted into the distance, trying to make out the far off hill Ace was pointing at. He couldn’t figure out if the blur rising over it was actually smoke, as Ace said, or just haze from the heat. Without the trees he could already feel his neck burning. He was thirsty too.  
  
“Hey, Ace,” he said, “you still have that watermelon stuff the Doctor gave you?”  
  
“Sure thing,” she said. She dug the vial of purple liquid out of her pocket and tossed it at him. Hex took a long drink, looking close at the level of liquid in the tube after he’d finished. It wasn’t much more than a five ounce container by appearance, but it still looked over half full.  
  
“Bigger on the inside probably,” Ace said, grabbing the vial off him to quench her own thirst. “Dimensional transcendence, like the TARDIS, the Professor’s been on a bit of a kick with it lately. I caught him sewing miniature black holes into his jacket pockets the other day.”  
  
“It’s hard to imagine him in front of a sewing machine,” said Hex. He smiled. After a moment, so did Ace.  
  
“He got really flustered about it,” she said, stepping backwards and miming with her hands. “Started giving me a lecture on the whole history of cotton production and stellar engineering. I think he was trying to distract me from the fact that I’d near as found him darning his socks. He had them in a little basket beside him, all ready to patch up.”  
  
“He does socks?” said Hex, laughing. “I’ll have to stop round and give him mine next time. I don’t know about you, but all this running puts holes through my heels like nothing’s business, and —” he stopped, trailing off as Ace took a hard breath. They were cut off from the TARDIS, the Doctor, and here he was nattering on about his socks. “Sorry,” Hex said.  
  
“Not that,” said Ace, gritting the words from between her teeth. She’d gone suddenly very pale Hex realised, and was breathing in a very slow, very controlled manner. Her hands were shaking. The vial was on the ground, leaking purple fluid into the dust.  
  
“Ace?” Hex asked.  
  
“Move,” she said. “Quickly.”  
  
“What?” Hex looked at her, followed her eyes, and leapt to the side. “Oh, my god!” he shouted as a huge brown snake slithered past him into the jungle. “Oh, my god!” he repeated, looking back at Ace. “That was — it must’ve been two metres long! That was — Ace, Ace, did it bite you? Ace?”  
  
She was swaying on her feet. The paleness had increased. That meant her circulatory system was being affected, or it could just be the shock of being bitten. Either that or she was in pain. Enough to — her breathing had sped up, control breached. Hex tried to remember everything about that time on A &E when the idiot with the cobra bite had shown up.  
  
“I think so,” said Ace.  
  
Delayed reaction, oh, this was so not good.  
  
“Ace,” sad Hex, trying to push away his panic and _calm down_ , “I need you to lay down, ‘kay?”  
  
“I think I will,” said Ace. “This doesn’t half hurt.”  
  
“In the shade if you can make it,” said Hex. “I don’t want to be treating sunburn and heat stroke on top of snakebite.”  
  
“I’m just difficult, aren’t I?” said Ace. She limped toward the jungle. Hex ducked under her arm to help her out, and the fact that she wasn’t shooing him off scared him half to death. He tried not to think about the odds they were facing. He kept his eyes on the ground, making sure he wasn’t leading Ace back for a second bite.  
  
“Oi, snake!” Ace shouted at the undergrowth as Hex positioned her on the ground with her back against a tree trunk. “Come back here, I’ll show you what-for, taking a chunk out of my ankle, you’re so going to regret that.”  
  
She waved a fist in mock anger. Hex gently stopped her, laying her arm down by her side. He took her pulse.   
  
“You’ve got to keep your heart rate down,” said Hex, “stay calm.”  
  
Ace grabbed his hand as he lifted it from her wrist. “I am calm,” she said.  
  
Hex looked into her eyes, and realised that the only panic he saw there came from his own reflection. She wasn’t afraid, or at least, she was hiding it very well. He was the one who wouldn’t be able to cope with it. With… They’d been laughing thirty seconds ago. He hated it. Why did this always happen?  
  
She squeezed his hand, reassuring.  
  
“I should be the one comforting you,” said Hex. Though he knew that was wrong; patients didn’t need comfort, they needed treatment. Unless it was palliative care for a terminal case. Then you could comfort all you liked. He used to enjoy visiting with the old ladies in the geriatrics wing…  
  
Ace wasn’t old.  
  
She smiled lopsidedly. “Staff Nurse Schofield.”  
  
“Yeah…”  
  
“We’ve been in tight spots before,” said Ace.  
  
Her face was still pale beneath the mud. There was a mosquito bite on her chin.   
  
She was so beautiful. And he was very close, hand in hand, nearly cheek to cheek. Her jaw was set as she tried to keep her pain a secret. Hex could smell her over the leaves and the loam. That rich, sweet Ace-smell like some kind of spice he could never identify, like gunpowder and cats and bar nuts. Old leather and citrus shampoo. She smelled like the Doctor too, vaguely, and the TARDIS. Like time and space, and all of the things Hex wanted to tell her but would now never get a chance.  
  
“Where is it?” he asked.  
  
“Ankle, right one.”  
  
It was higher than that, Hex realised as he rolled up her trouser cuff. The snake had got her mid-way up her calf. It only seemed to have dug in properly with one fang, but that was enough. The bite site was already swelling, the flesh around the puncture turning an awful mottled red.  
  
And they didn’t have the TARDIS or a hospital handy.   
  
“Ace…” Hex started.  
  
“Shhhh.” She lifted a finger to his lips, blocking anything further. He didn’t need to tell her. _She knew_. “Let’s just sit ‘kay? Wait for the Doctor.”  
  
Hex blinked. “I’ll go back, through the cave. Get to the TARDIS. He’s got to have some kind of anti-venom in the med-bay. He’s got everything in there.”  
  
“Probably,” said Ace. “He’s such a packrat, you know, once…” she trailed off. “You can’t go back,” she said. “Hex, you can’t.”  
  
“I’m not scared.”  
  
“You are, though. Stop being a lout and trying to pretend. You didn’t see that thing in the cave, I did, and trust me, you would not be good after a tangle with it.”  
  
“I’ll be quiet then, sneak by.”  
  
“You? Quiet? I’d like to see it. Besides, they’ve got better hearing than you do.”  
  
“I could do,” he said, smiling despite himself. The grin disappeared as he remembered himself. He took her pulse again. Tachycardia was starting, and he didn’t know what to do.  
  
“Here I am telling you to keep your heart rate down and I get into an argument with you,” he muttered. “Some nurse I am.”  
  
“Oh, Hex,” Ace said. She patted his arm. “I guess I shouldn’t ask,” she said, “seeing as you’ll just freak out again, but how long do I have?”  
  
“I don’t know. It depends on the kind of snake and I’m hardly an expert. I’ve got you propped up, and if you can keep calm that should slow it spreading…” Hex swallowed. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to list off possible symptoms; failing organs, uncontrollable bleeding, swelling, necrosis…  
  
Still, he wanted to keep her talking. He had to keep her talking, and calm, and conscious so she could tell him if there were any changes.  
  
“It could be a dry bite,” Hex said, drawing on his thin knowledge. He’d been trained a bit on the subject; people on camping trips still got bit by adders, rarely, but it happened, and there were always yahoos like the man with a cobra. A nurse needed to know what to do.   
  
“That happens sometimes,” Hex continued. “The snake forgets to release the poison. You still have to watch out for infection and potential sepsis, but… And who knows? Maybe it wasn't poisonous at all, yeah? Maybe we're just over-reacting?”  
  
“I don’t think so,” said Ace. She grimaced. “My leg’s gone all tingly.”  
  
“Oh, my god.”  
  
“Please don’t start that again, Hex.”  
  
“Dorothy…”  
  
“Oi, I’m not dead yet.”  
  
“McShane…”  
  
“You’d better not be about to propose to me or something.”  
  
“No, I mean, but, Ace…”  
  
“Full words now, you can do it.”  
  
“It’s been good, hasn’t it?” he said.  
  
“Yeah,” Ace agreed, taking his hand again. “It’s been good.”  
  
They sat in the shade for a long moment, hands and worries linked. Then Hex broke the grip, standing up sharply.  
  
“No,” he said, his mind finally overcoming the shock response and launching back into reason. “No, this is not how this works. You don’t just give up. You’re _Ace_. You’re like the Doctor only —”   
  
He stopped himself before he could say human, because that implied mortality, and all those possibilities he was forcing his thoughts to run away from. There was another way she was different too, but he couldn’t admit that one either. Like Ace said, she wasn’t dead yet. And that was the only time she’d ever consent to settle down and —  
  
Not that —  
  
She was looking at him funny. And it was funny, sort of; them with their roles reversed; him the one taking charge to save the day. It would have been better if he wasn’t talking too fast and tripping over his words, and trying to stop himself shaking as he said them;  
  
“I am going back through that cave, and finding the TARDIS, and getting you an antidote, and any scary cat-monster that tries to get between me and it can just go lump it in a corner with a ball of yarn.” He took a deep breath. “You’re not getting rid of me so easily,” he said.  
  
“Oi, Hex, who said anything about giving up? I just said not to go back into that cave.”  
  
She still had that funny look, like he was missing something again. And Hex felt suddenly stupid and self-conscious about his heroics performance. Of course, this was Ace, and _of course_ she didn’t give up. What was the plan then?  
  
“Well, what else is there?”  
  
“There’s the smoke.”  
  
Hex pondered for a moment. If he could get past the cat-thing, through the cave, and back to the TARDIS, he’d have a cure, almost for sure. But it was dodgy odds all the way that he’d actually make it. He wasn’t sure he remembered the way out of the cave for one thing — and what if it sent him somewhere else? If it was a time hole or loop or something, who knew? He remembered belatedly that the post-script of the Doctor’s warning had warned them to watch out for sinkholes.  
  
The smoke, though. That was just over the hills. He could get there. Ace could probably get there as well with a little help, though he was loath to move her.  
  
“We don’t know what’s causing it,” said Hex. “It could just be a forest fire.”  
  
“Yeah, maybe,” said Ace. “If there was still a forest out there to burn.” She grimaced, doubling up. Hex was back on his knees by her side in an instant.  
  
“What is it?” he asked. “Cramp?”  
  
“Yeah…” Ace was breathing hard. “Not that bad.”  
  
“Don’t lie.”  
  
“Pretty bad. You might want to move away. I feel like I’m going to be sick.”  
  
“Any other symptoms?”  
  
“A bit of a headache. It’s mostly just my leg. I think that’s what’s making me feel sick…”  
  
“No joke,” said Hex.  
  
Ace smiled weakly. “Stupid snake. I see why you don’t like them.”  
  
Hex checked her leg again. The wound was weeping. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He didn’t have anything to properly clean it with, and he didn’t want to put on a dressing and keep the poison in if it did work its way to the surface. His instinct was to apply a tourniquet, but if he was going to do that he should have ten minutes ago. It wouldn’t do much to stop the spread now.  
  
“Shouldn’t you be sucking the poison out or something?” Ace asked.  
  
“No, bacteria from my mouth would just make the wound more susceptible to infection.”  
  
“I think that’s the least of my worries,” said Ace.  
  
“It still wouldn’t do much,” said Hex. “Other than potentially make me sick, and then we’d both be in for it.”  
  
Ace leaned back against the tree. She looked up, squinting at the desert beyond their little patch of wood. “That’s a controlled blaze,” she said. “There are people over there.”  
  
“No saying they’d help us, or be able to help,” said Hex.  
  
“True, but it’s better than sitting here slowly dying of snake venom.”  
  
Hex winced.  
  
“Well, it’s true,” said Ace. “No use pretending.”  
  
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” said Hex.  
  
“Oh, you were fine leaving me alone to troop off through that cave and wrestle with a cat-monster, but taking a short hike across the lawn by yourself is too much for you.”  
  
“Don’t,” said Hex.  
  
Ace shrugged, settling better into position. Her face was tight and Hex could tell that her sudden brusqueness was at least partially due to pain. He followed her gaze to the far off string of smoke. She was right; that was their best chance.  
  
“Okay then,” Hex said. “Off I go.”  
  
He checked the bite again and took her pulse again, even though it was superfluous to do so and wasted precious time. He retrieved the purple vial from where Ace had dropped it. Most of the fluid had leaked out. Bigger on the inside or no, it was all but empty. Still, he gave it to Ace.  
  
“In case you get thirsty.”  
  
He was thirsty himself, but didn’t say anything. Then he noticed something, and he cursed himself for not seeing it sooner; a reprieve, maybe, growing just by the border between jungle and wasteland.  
  
“Ace!”  
  
“What? I thought you were leaving, so go already.”  
  
“No, I mean, it’s that bush. The one with the thorns on it!”  
  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  
  
“The one I almost fell into. The one that —”  
  
Hex regarded the bush. It was about hip-height and covered with vicious red thorns. It was also covered by vicious red ants. He gritted his teeth. This was going to hurt. He rooted around for a good sized stick and used it to start digging. Almost immediately, the ants started biting.  
  
“Ow, ow, ow…”  
  
“Hex.” Ace shifted her position to look at him. “What are you doing?”  
  
“Mauss, he said that the roots of this bush, oh, ow, ow, ow, owowowowow.”  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
“It’s the ants, they’re, ow, OW, how’d they even get in there.”  
  
“Just leave it Hex.”  
  
“No, I’m almost, here. Ow.”  
  
Hex went back over to her with a piece of curled root. His hands were covered with angry-looking welts. A few ants were doggedly still hanging on, their pincers dug deep. Hex ignored them and brushed off the root.  
  
“Chew,” he said to Ace.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Mauss said that if you were bit by a snake you could chew the roots of that bush and it would give you time. So chew.”  
  
“Really, what’s with all the botany suddenly? I thought you were a nurse not a gardener.”  
  
“Ace, please, for me?”  
  
“Oh, all right.”  
  
She took the proffered root and gnawed on it like a piece of rawhide. Her face twisted with the presumably awful taste of it. Hex hoped that the root worked, that there wasn’t some sort of special preparation he’d missed out on — that his clever little idea wasn’t going to make everything ten times worse.  
  
“You going now?” Ace asked, audibly annoyed.  
  
“Yeah,” said Hex. He scratched at his arms desperately, wriggled, and then slapped at his clothing in an effort to dislodge the rest of the ants. Their bites burned. It was like a thousand drops of hot wax, or being stung by a hundred bees, or something. He hoped he wouldn’t have an adverse allergic reaction to it. That would be just the thing.  
  
He turned to the man-made desert and regarded his goal. He wasn’t much a judge of distance, but it looked about three kilometres, maybe four. He hoped he’d be able to get that far under the hot sun without water. At least his clothes were still damp, that was something to help keep him cool. Though it wouldn’t last.  
  
He licked his lips, already chapped from the time he’d spent in the sun yesterday. So long ago.   
  
“Hex,” said Ace, before he could set off for good. He hesitated on the edge of the shade, caught between urgency and the need to stay. His feet itched. He didn’t want to look back, because if he saw her sitting there so small it would be stuck in his mind forever.   
  
He didn’t want to remember her like that.  
  
He looked back. "Yeah?”  
  
Beige tee-shirt, stuck down with fast-drying rain water, streaked with mud. Mosquito bite on the chin. Rolled up cuff. The bite. Dark eyes gone golden. Hair unfurled. A small smile and concern, just for him. Her voice overly cheerful, trying to be normal.  
  
“Stay safe.”  
  
Hex shuffled onto one foot, still caught. More firmly now. He looked for words in the far off horizon, and the little beacon of smoke still trailing its thin thread of hope against the blue. Too easy to cut it free. And her again.   
  
Time up.  
  
“You too, Ace, you too.”  
  
  
 _tbc_


	10. Fire

_What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?_  
  
Marcel Mauss, The Gift  
  
  
  
  
The heat from the fire was nothing compared to the heat in the sky.  
  
Ak was looking for wood and not finding any. Instead he gathered dried and half burnt maize stalks from the terraces. The trampled, ruined crop would make poor, quickly-wasted fuel, but it was something. The fires could not go out. The lime needed to be melted to plaster and the temple polished to be a white and gleaming beacon to the sky. Maybe then the gods would take some notice of their plight?  
  
Ak knew that his father thought it was foolishness, but Ak had watched the crops failing since he was barely old enough to walk and he knew from talk that the drought was not isolated to their small plot. The whole of civilization was crumbling. It was said that the shinning towers of Tikal had been set alight and the king slain; that the same was happening at city states and settlements both small and mighty across the world. They were on their own out here in the dry limestone hills.  
  
Many had left already, migrating away in search of better lands and fresh running water, but Ak stayed. He wondered if that had been the right choice. He was young still. Fourteen was barely a man. Barely anything. His father had begged him to leave and follow his siblings down the trail.  
  
But Ak stayed. The only other people left in the settlement were priests, and elders, and poor old deformed Hab’us. And, of course, the visitors. Ak was the strong back they all needed. Besides, what else was there if the rains never came? There had been strange omens in the sky and earth of late. Ghosts and creatures of legend walked the settlement at night, devouring the unwary.  
  
Maybe his father was right, but with such proof Ak could not disbelieve the priest’s words. The sun was hot on his back and he was thirsty, but that was normal. What little water there was left was being severely rationed, with the largest portion going to making plaster for the temple. Ak bent to collect more stalks, his eyes catching movement in the valley as he leaned over.  
  
There was a person down there. Ak squinted. The stranger was stumbling over the barren terraces, coming from the direction of Xibalba, the Underworld.  
  
Ak’s gaze narrowed. They’d been getting many visitors from Xibalba since the doorway opened. More than they had resources to maintain. This visitor was stumbling and obviously dehydrated. He was pale-haired and wore strange clothing. Not one of the sky-men then.  
  
Ak hunkered against the ridge. It was not good camouflage, but, being covered with soot as he was, Ak thought that his motionlessness would hide him against the ashy slope. Especially to the eyes of a heat-addled visitor.  
  
The visitor fainted. It was inevitable. Ak stood and descended the slope. He stood over the visitor’s crumpled form. Ash and burning cinders drifted over the hills from the bonfire. The breeze caught them into a swirl. Ak used his foot to prod the unconscious stranger onto his back. Only his hair was pale, yellow like the maize; the visitor's face was scalded red from sun.  
  
“Ace…” he murmured.  
  
Ak hesitated. “Visitor,” he asked, “are you awake?”  
  
There was no response. The visitor lay limp against the patched black and white ground. Ash and lime. Ak’s fingers strayed briefly to the stone knife he kept in a pouch by his waist, but no, that would be wrong. Still, it would be easy to walk away; to do nothing and leave the visitor to his fate.  
  
Omens and signs aside, Ak did not think the visitors had anything to do with the gods. The sky-men maybe, but not this pitiful stranger. Strange in appearance he might be, he was still clearly a mortal man, and he would clearly die soon from his thirst. Many of the visitors died. It would not be thought abnormal.  
  
Ak did not want to share his water.  
  
As he thought, the visitor coughed. It was the dry cough of a man with no moisture left in his mouth. The visitor opened his eyes, slowly, for they must have been as desiccated as his lips. The lids parted to reveal bloodshot blue.  
  
Ak thought the man would ask for water, or groan in pain. Instead he repeated the strange word:  
  
“Ace…” he licked his cracked lips, as if that would help, and coughed again. The visitor looked at Ak, but did not seem to truly see. He was looking past Ak’s head.  
  
Ak turned and saw the smoke from the bonfire rising in a billowing black pillar over the hills.  
  
“The smoke…” the visitor said.  
  
Ak frowned. This was not how these things usually went, but then, what was normal in these last days? One of the great cycles was coming to an end, and nothing would ever be the same again.  
  
“I didn’t think I would make it…”  
  
“You came to find us?” asked Ak. “What for?”  
  
“She was bitten. I need… where am I? Oh, my god…” The visitor’s chest rose and fell rapidly. His eyes half closed, too dry to press completely shut.  
  
“Ace,” the visitor said, before lapsing into silence again.  
  
Ak stood and observed, waiting to see if the strange visitor would wake again. He did not. Nor did he die. Ak chewed his own parched lip and came to a decision;   
  
He walked away.  
  
*  
  
Very blurry. Something on his face. On his face. If only he could finished opening his eyes. Very blurry. It was cold on his face. Water. Was it… he needed…  
  
“Ace!”  
  
Hex sat bolt upright, and immediately regretted it. His entire body ached. That was dehydration a clear, clinical little voice sitting somewhere at the back of his pounding skull informed him. Worse than his hang-over after finals. Stupid. Stupid. He must have passed out. Where was he now. How would he…  
  
“Hex?”  
  
“Doctor?”  
  
Hex’s voice was a creak. The Doctor was sitting beside him. They were both on some sort of raised earth platform at the rear of a small hut. Sunlight streamed in between cracks in the woodwork and thatched roof. But the Doctor was beside him, easing Hex back into a reclined posture, dampening his sunburnt face with a handful of moistened leaves.  
  
The hat, the jacket, the paisley scarf, the daft question-mark jumper. It was all there. It had to be a dream. He was still unconscious. He had to wake up… He was going to be sick.  
  
“Hex,” the Doctor asked, his soft burr cutting through the haze. There was a hand soothing Hex’s back through the worst of it. “Drink this.”   
  
It was the purple liquid again. The Doctor had another vial. Like watermelons. Black holes. Socks. Hex couldn’t stop drinking, even though his stomach was sloshing and he knew he should stop. The Doctor gently took the vial away.  
  
“Where is Ace?”  
  
“She was bitten,” Hex said. He felt woozy, and it was more than exhaustion. Had the Doctor drugged him? Bastard. He needed to tell him. He needed —  
  
His skin was on fire, what was that about? It was like he’d shoved an arm in an ant hill. Oh, right.  
  
“Where,” the Doctor asked, more insistent. There was fear in his eye. Those ancient, alien eyes. Not a bastard then. Just… oh, Hex thought, why couldn’t he think.  
  
“By the cave. There were socks. You could do mine. It’s an awful lot of running. For socks. For Ace. Running. She’s running out of time. She was bitten…”  
  
“Shhh, calm down Hex, sleep.”  
  
“But she’s been bitten Doctor. She’ll die. She could die. Oh my god. She could. Could…” Hex was too weak to fight off the rising hysteria, but he was also too tired to sustain it. His eyes slid shut, and he floated away to sleep, all dreams repressed by whatever it was the Doctor had made him drink.  
  
He didn’t see the Doctor set his jaw and stare off into space. Or hear his sad voice, as he whispered to no one;  
  
“Oh, Hex. Ace. Why didn’t you stay put?”  
  
*  
  
The next time Hex woke, he was far more lucid and the pounding in his head had subsided some. He was still stretched out across the platform at the back of the hut. He could see better now how the platform raised out of the earth and smoothed with cracking plaster. It took up half the floor space. There were a few clay bowls lined up on the ground beside the platform; one with scummy water, one with porridge, and one with —  
  
Hex wrinkled his nose as the scent-memory of bodily fluids brought back flashes of his delirium, memories of A &E on bad days, and adventures with the Doctor and Ace when everything had gone wrong.   
  
This could probably fall into that last category, Hex thought without humour.  
  
The Doctor was sitting on the platform beside Hex, staring off into space. No, not space, the hut’s closed door. He looked down when Hex stirred.  
  
“Welcome back,” the Doctor said.  
  
“Ace…” Hex said, the question coming even as he knew it was too late. How long had he been unconscious? how had he even got here?  
  
“I’m sorry,” said the Doctor. His eyes were swirling galaxies, and time, but Hex swore that he saw those stars dimming and going out. Faded cinders floating through space.  
  
“That’s not good enough,” said Hex, swinging his legs over the edge. He was still dizzy, but it was tolerable. He stood, taking a moment to regain his equilibrium before walking the few steps to the door. The Doctor said nothing.  
  
Hex pushed open the door. It was a thin construction of dried wood and splintered mud. Outside, he got a brief glimpse of fire and white mounds before his view was blocked by a burly old man with a spear in one hand.  
  
“Back inside,” the man barked.  
  
Startled, Hex did as told, stumbling back to the platform at the rear of the hut as the door slammed shut. It took him a moment to realise that the guard had only been in possession of one arm.  
  
“We’re prisoners then,” said Hex.  
  
“It would appear so,” said the Doctor.  
  
“But that man only had one arm, and this hut isn’t especially solid. I mean, you’re practically Houdini.” Hex levelled his gaze at the Doctor, accusation overcoming everything else. “you could have got out by now if you’d wanted to.”  
  
“And left you to their tender mercies?” asked the Doctor, and shook his head. “There was a boy, Ak, not a bad young man given what he’s lived through. He came back from gathering and told the priests that he’d found you dead in the field. Of course, you hadn’t been dead, quite, and I was able to argue for you to stay in my cell. It’s been four days Hex.”  
  
Four days. Hex closed his eyes, squeezing them tight to keep all of his emotions inside. Even at the outset, Ace couldn’t have had longer than twelve hours from when he left her.  
  
“You could have got out,” he said to the Doctor.  
  
The Doctor shuffled uncomfortably, and Hex knew that he was being cruel. He also knew a lie when he saw one, and the Doctor wasn’t nearly so good at hiding his schemes as he thought —  
  
He _could_ have got out. He _could_ have saved Ace.   
  
And he hadn’t. Simple as that.  
  
“Why are we being held?” Hex asked.  
  
“We’re guests, officially” said the Doctor, shrugging. The hard grief on his shoulders seemed to fall off, replaced by an air of almost normalcy and false cheerfulness. Hex hated him a little for that. Time ticked through an uneasy contemplation.   
  
“I’m going to be sacrificed,” said the Doctor. “That’s what they’ve been doing with the majority of their ‘visitors’. Poor stragglers from other times. Most of them don’t survive the journey. All that comes through is old bones, and dust.”  
  
“Brendan, the staff members?” Hex asked.  
  
The Doctor said nothing.  
  
“So we’re just waiting here to die? Is that it?” asked Hex.  
  
The Doctor said nothing.  
  
“And what visitors? What’s going on? I know you know. And I think I deserve an explanation. I think that Ace deserves an explanation.”  
  
The Doctor flinched. He leaned forward and picked up the bowl of grey-yellow porridge in front of the platform. He offered it to Hex.  
  
“Eat this, you’ll be needing your strength.”  
  
Hex wanted to dash the bowl out of the Doctor hands and across the floor. He wanted to shout and rage, but after his long sleep he was starving. He took the bowl and ate the gritty corn meal soup with his fingers, glaring at the Doctor over every mouthful.   
  
“Initially,” the Doctor said, not meeting Hex’s eye. “I believed that the temporal kidnappings were being conducted by one of the abstract races. The circumstances seemed to point towards the Lonely Assassins, except —” the Doctor paused, shaking his head.   
  
“Once upon a time,” he said, his voice low and strangely rhythmic, dream-like, “there was a planet. It didn’t have a name. The people who lived there had a superficial resemblance to wild cats, cheetahs more precisely. They were burningly intelligent when they could see past their hunger. They had horses, which I always thought was slightly odd. They must have been able to run faster than they rode…” he trailed off for a moment, puzzlement at old memories breaking the cadence until he shook his head and said firmly; “It doesn’t matter.”  
  
He continued:  
  
“This planet, many legends surrounded it. It wasn’t Earth; but the Master was certain that its savage inhabitants were somehow descended from humans. I’m not entirely convinced he was wrong, though other stories point to that place as being the future of my own people, or our past. Again, it does not really matter. “  
  
“What does matter is that the planet of the Cheetah people was dying, and a few of the inhabitants, those which still had the sense to overcome their instincts, built a ship. Or rather, they stole a ship, and augmented it. The Master’s ship —”  
  
“And just who is the Master?” asked Hex. The corn porridge tasted foul, and after a few mouthfuls he had put the bowl and his hunger aside, listening intently to the Doctor’s half-understandable words. “I heard Ace saying that name in her sleep once.”  
  
The Doctor seemed slightly startled by Hex’s interruption to his narrative. He’d seemingly been lulled almost into a trance by his own words. Hex had felt the same effect. He’d asked the question less out of curiosity and more out of an attempt to fight off the drowsiness brought on by the Doctor’s voice.  
  
“He’s probably dead now,” said the Doctor without emotion. Which Hex didn’t think was much of an answer, but he didn’t press the point. The Doctor let the sentence hang for a moment too long before continuing;   
  
“He was a Time Lord and the refugees from the Cheetah planet stole his TARDIS, but they couldn’t control it, and their emotions corrupted, no — infected — her; not that she was very stable to begin with, given who her master had been.”  
  
“And they crashed here, in this place. A few kilometres to the north. The ship fractured a temporal line. She buried herself into the earth, her open doors forming a link between here and now and then. But it was worse than that; Hex, you know that the TARDIS is alive?”  
  
“You may have mentioned it.”  
  
The Doctor’s already quiet voice dropped further, and became somehow darker. Hex shivered. The heat in the hut was near suffocating, but for a moment he’d felt cold as glaciers. There were goose bumps all along his arms.  
  
“The stress the Master’s TARDIS must have been under —” the Doctor said. “She was very probably insane, even previous to the infection. After the crash her consciousness split and left its shell. She’s scattered herself throughout time, trapped in this one spatial location, taking physical hosts to keep herself alive; a trick she probably learned from her pilot.”  
  
“So the people she pulled through time…” said Hex.  
  
“Some of them,” the Doctor confirmed. “A very nasty way to go, taken and used as a vehicle, compressed into a corner of your own mind until you’re blotted out entirely. She kills her hosts too quickly, she needs to shift, to pull in more. She also needs to feed. Cut off from her body she’s living off the potential energy of the people she displaces. She needs that even more than she needs new hosts; she consumes them.   
  
“That’s why she wanted me, most of all, the energy of a Time Lord, a synaptic structure complex enough to house her mind for more than a fleeting moment, but she’s weak; she couldn’t quite centre in on my pattern. She was grabbing wildly; Lodge, José. She cast her net, back and forth through time, tightening it until she found me. But I escaped, now she’s waiting for me to come back. She wants me, she wants the TARDIS most of all, a new shell, but luckily I parked the old girl outside of her range.”  
  
“Ah,” said Hex, a tight lump forming in his stomach.  
  
“Hex?”  
  
“We sort of moved her.”  
  
“I was afraid of that. Where is she? Is she in this timezone?” The Doctor closed his eyes. “I can’t sense her in the temporal vicinity.”  
  
“No, she’s back in the present, I mean the future, she’s by the archaeology site. We left Mauss there. We meant to come here, but the TARDIS wouldn’t land, she was shaking. Ace found a cave, that’s how we —” Hex stopped. “The cave, it was bigger on the inside. And there was a creature in it, Ace said it looked like a cat.”  
  
“The shell, yes. Obviously the Cheetah people are still inhabiting it.” The Doctor steepled his fingers under his chin.  
  
“My TARDIS resisted coming to this point because this where the temporal distortions are strongest, however, the spatial coordinates you’ve flown her to put her at risk. If the Master’s TARDIS manages to overcome her defences we will be trapped here indefinitely. The power transfer during the possession may be enough to tear apart this planet.”  
  
The Doctor’s voice was too calm, and almost curious.  
  
“May?” Hex asked. “ _May_ be enough to tear apart this planet? This isn’t just some place. You can’t just calmly say that Earth may be torn apart, and oh, by the way, it’s been four days and Ace is —”  
  
“It could be localized to this continent,” said the Doctor. He frowned. “I told you to stay put. I spent two weeks carving that message.”  
  
“You’ve been here two weeks?” asked Hex.  
  
“I’ve been here two months,” said the Doctor.  
  
“Two months?!?”  
  
“Temporal distortions Hex. Time within time.”  
  
“You said they sacrificed most of the people who fell through, why —”  
  
“Why haven’t they killed me? These are the Maya Hex, not the Aztecs, absolute human sacrifice isn’t as common here as popular culture might have you think, especially in a small settlement like this. They’d more probably ask for a voluntary blood offering to bless their temple, and then they send you to spend a night in communication with the gods of the underworld. Normally this would be perfectly benign if a bit uncomfortable, but given that the Maya believe caves are entrances to the underworld, and that the disconnected body of a certain renegade TARDIS is currently masquerading as one…”  
  
“Oh, my god,” said Hex.  
  
“Something like that,” the Doctor agreed. “In any case, the priests of this settlement were rather intrigued by my biology. I told them that I was a sky-man, and now they’ve decided to delay my sacrifice until their new temple’s final dedication. They hope to win the gods’ blessing to stop the drought that they’re currently experiencing.”  
  
“The drought…” Hex asked, “was that caused by this other TARDIS crashing, and the cat-monsters, and all of it?”  
  
“No,” the Doctor said. “At least, I don’t think so. Historically this is a very dry period in Earth’s history, and the Maya have severely disrupted their local ecosystem with their irrigation systems and clear cutting. As the drought progressed they attempted to ward it off by building new temples and burning lime for plaster. Typical human short-sightedness.” He paused, as if considering.  
  
“They were a great people in their time. In a few short centuries their cities will be nothing more than moss covered ruins. But, they will survive. They’ll adopt new farming techniques and simpler lifestyles. The Maya people still exist, even in your time Hex. They kept their culture and their language alive despite this collapse, and despite the invasion of their land by people from across the sea.”  
  
“That’s well and good for them,” said Hex, “but what about us. How our we going to escape and stop this giant big bad bang you were talking about from happening?” He didn’t finish the rest of his thought out loud, the: _how are we going to of any of it now that Ace is…_   
  
He didn’t even finish that part in his head.  
  
“We wait,” said the Doctor.  
  
“For what?” asked Hex.  
  
The Doctor’s mouth twitched, very slightly. The hut was hot as an oven at full bake, sweat beading on everything and waiting for a reply that wouldn’t solve anything.  
  
“To be sacrificed.”  
  
  
 _tbc_


	11. Blood

  
_What the hammer? what the chain?  
In what furnace was thy brain?  
What the anvil? what dread grasp  
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? _  
  
William Blake, The Tyger  
  
  
  
The vans had been white once, a long time ago; two, three decades? Probably more. They’d been designed for level roads and city traffic. Watching them bounce and growl along the bumpy, half-flooded track into camp, Mauss wondered, as always, what god or goddess of automotive engineering those drivers had left a first born son to in order to keep their livelihoods on the road.  
  
The truth was that they were just damned good mechanics, and stubborn in the way you only could be when your main income relied on making the unworkable work and bringing dead engines back to life again and again.  
  
The vans, three of them, came to a stop just in front of the dinning hut. The students stood in the field with their packs bundled into mud-stained neon piles around them. The lawn underfoot was patched with dull squares and hexagons where their tents had killed the grass.  
  
Mauss watched it all rather dully, like a dream. Some of the students were quiet, others were exchanging sharp words about wasted money and possible refunds. Mauss had known them all by name a week ago; now they were just a blur of faces in an endless round. His last class. He’d been on phone in town earlier when he arranged the vans, and the university was already starting inquiries. There would be reporters gathered to meet the plane on his return.  
  
“Death in the Jungle” — it had been a slow news week, and the header was catchy.  
  
Right, then, enough standing around. Those vans wouldn’t load themselves.  
  
Was that him shouting orders? Just like normal then.  
  
The grads were scurrying to follow his commands, to move the students into line-ups.  
  
One of the drivers, Eddie, an old friend, was on the roof of his van helping get the luggage secured to the rack. When he hopped down he gave Mauss a pat on the back and some words of comfort, and Mauss managed to keep up his front. to keep the exodus smooth.  
  
But, damn, he wanted to leave. His skin itched, and Cig kept shooting him strange looks — he still hadn’t given an adequate explanation for how he’d got to the site without transport the other day. They all thought he’d snapped, and maybe he had. The air felt thick and the day’s rain was well past due. The sky was tinted with an eerie green haze.  
  
That was it, the vans were loaded, he could leave now and go far, far away. Except one of the students had deserted the line and was walking away from the vans. A petite blonde — Sandra, Mauss’ tired brain supplied.  
  
For a brief moment he hated her. How dare she make any kind of delay? His insides were all twisted up with being sad and scared and just wanting to get the heck out.  
  
He jogged over and stepped into her path. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  
  
She paused. The wind blew, cutting the hot air and rattling the leaves. “It’s stronger now,” she said.  
  
“It’s time to leave,” said Mauss.  
  
She turned. She was smiling. Her eyes were blank. “Yes, it is.”  
  
The wind increased and she started to fade. Ghost in; ghost out. Mauss had heard that sound only a few days before, but he’d justified the entire episode as a fugue state. Some kind of break brought on by stress.  
  
A few moments later Mauss was alone in the field, staring off into the jungle, the sound of the universe ebbing in his ears.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Hex was stirred from his sleep by a mosquito droning around his ear, a very loud, very persistent mosquito. Or so he thought. Waving his hand to off it roused the AWOL staff nurse enough to realise that mosquitoes didn’t sound like that. Only one thing in the universe sounded like that.  
  
“The TARDIS!” He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the dirt platform. The hut was hot and empty. “Doctor?”  
  
The door swung open. The Doctor was being restrained by the burly, one-armed guard. Not terribly well — Hex was reasonably sure the Doctor could give the slip if he wanted to. Behind the Doctor and the guard was the plaza, the temples, the heat-glazed sky. Construction was finished now and, while small-scale, the complex was reasonably impressive: four short, shining white ziggurats complemented with red ochre bands along the stairs. A beacon in the middle of the wasteland.  
  
There was no blue box to break the colour scheme. Whatever Hex had heard, the TARDIS was not there.   
  
“Hello Hex,” said the Doctor, overly cheerful. “Good morning. I was just having a chat with Hab’us here, and it’s time we went down to the cave.”  
  
“The cave?”  
  
“To be sacrificial offerings, please keep up.”   
  
Hex was still half asleep, but not groggy enough to be pulled in by the banter. The Doctor’s eyes were grim.  
  
“I heard the —”  
  
“Yes, Hex?” the Doctor asked, cutting him off.  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
The burly guard was soon joined by a few spindly old men, and a disgruntled looking teenager, all emaciated. Hex thought he could probably fight them off — the men looked like they’d snap in a strong wind and the kid was half his size. The kid also had lean muscled arms and a bruising grip. Hex couldn’t push him off when his arms were grabbed from behind.  
  
“Hex…” the Doctor said out of the corner of his mouth.  
  
Just go along with it, Hex thought. Right, don’t struggle, just be a docile lamb to the slaughter. Any second now he’d snap and run off. Instead he fell into line and the teen released his hold on Hex’s arms.  
  
It was a long walk over the desert. The sun was still low in the sky, but even though the soaring mid-day temperatures hadn’t been reached it was still nearly unbearable. The skin on the back of Hex’s neck was still peeling from his last excursion, and he pulled his fedora down tight as a shield. He saw the Doctor do the same with his own panama.  
  
“Drink?”  
  
The Doctor held out his container of purple hydration syrup. Hex accepted it gratefully. He noticed that even the Doctor was sweating. When he handed it back, the Doctor tried to share the brightly-coloured drink with their captors.  
  
“What is it?” asked the teen.  
  
“Ak, isn’t it?” said the Doctor. “You’ll enjoy it.”  
  
The teen took the vial and gave a dubious sip. His eyes brightened in wonderment. “Fruit!” he said.  
  
“Not quite, but it’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Ak?” said the Doctor. “Drink up.”  
  
Hex turned his head from the exchange and tried to chart how far they’d come. The temples and settlement had fallen out of sight behind some hills, though they still passed abandoned and burned out huts with some frequency. Even more often they’d pass empty platforms, making Hex wonder how many more homes there might have been that had been dissembled for fuel. Broken pottery crunched underfoot.  
  
The air was rough and dry, but it was better than the pong in the prison hut. One thing to be grateful for, at least.  
  
The procession went up a large hill, marching over the step-like terraces one by one.  
  
“That must have been their reservoir,” said the Doctor, directing Hex’s eyes to a hole dug at the base of the mount. There was still some kind of sludge in the bottom. “See how it’s dug to catch the run-off from the fields?”  
  
“Soon it will be filled again,” said Ak, passing the drink tube back to the Doctor.  
  
“One day…” said the Doctor.   
  
“Today,” said Ak, with fervent faith.  
  
Hex shook his head and looked away. He recalled being told by one of the students at the camp that there was no surface water within a four mile radius of R-506 and hadn’t been since ‘The Collapse’. He was assuming this post-apocalyptic wasteland qualified.  
  
From the crest of the hill Hex could see the small patch of jungle surrounding the cave in the distance. A half-hour later and they were at its edge. The sun had come up higher and hotter during the march, but was still low enough to push creeping shadows out of the trees towards them.  
  
Hex watched the Doctor’s face as they walked into the shade. The patches of dark and light played over his inscrutable features and stupidly still-clean suit. How could he manage that small miracle and not — Hex looked away. His eyes landed in the wrong place.  
  
He’d been looking for it, but he didn’t remember the jungle as well as he thought. It was all just trees to him. That was the tree though, he knew it, the one he’d leaned Ace up against. And she wasn’t there.  
  
Hex broke away from the procession, ignoring the yells of his guards. It couldn’t be the same tree, the same curving roots. There was an empty, purple-stained vial nested between them.  
  
Hex dropped to his knees, picking the vial up and turning it over and over. Light and shadow and reflections. There weren’t any remains; if she’d — Hex swallowed, he was strong enough to think it — if Ace had died here her body had already rotted away, or been carried off by some animal. Or she had gone off on her own.  
  
Hex tried not to think of that, of her spending her last hours staggering delirious and thirsty through the dried up jungle corpse, or out into the wasteland beyond, or down into the cave. Or the thought of one of those creatures coming out of the cave, to drag her, dead or alive back into the depths. The teenager Ak came up behind him and started tugging on Hex’s shoulder.  
  
Bonelessly, Hex let himself be led back to the track. He felt flushed, and knew it wasn’t the heat. Why wouldn’t his eyes stop burning? There were fresh slashes on the tree that looked like they could only have been made by claws.  
  
“I left her there,” said Hex to the Doctor. “Just there, you can see the vial between the roots. And I just left her there, by herself. I should have stayed. Oh, my god. I should have...” He stopped.   
  
“It’s your fault,” he said to the Doctor.  
  
“I know.”  
  
They went on in silence until they reached the dip leading to the cave. They stopped staggered along the edge.  
  
“This is it then,” said Hex. He found that he didn’t really care. He fixed his eyes on his feet, not looking to see what the Doctor was doing.  
  
One of the old priests started chanting. Hex could only make out one word in ten. He didn’t know if that was because the TARDIS was so far off, or because it they were only made-up words anyways, spoken just for the effect. A shove between the shoulder blades started Hex down the slope, carefully picking his way to the bottom. The cave mouth yawned before them.  
  
He could run now, Hex realised, he could run and get the TARDIS from the other side, and pilot it back to before Ace got bit. He could shift everything around.  
  
He pondered it for a moment for a moment as the great mouth of the earth opened around them. The way it would feel, his feet sliding on the rocks, climbing back into the jungle of the future, making his way to the TARDIS. He imagined Ace in his arms, alive, and warm, and berating him loudly for disobeying the Doctor. And then they’d laugh and hit each other on the back. And all would be forgiven.  
  
That was stupid talking. Hex pressed his fists into his sides, and tried to keep his feet from bolting.  
  
The cave was darker than he remembered. The strange white glow that had illuminated it before completely gone. Their captors picked up unlit torches from a pile near the entrance and set them ablaze with flint-bought sparks.  
  
Inside they all progressed through the rocky alleys and by-ways. If the stone city had seemed alien and disturbing before, now it was a thousand times worse. The torches flickered to illuminate far too little. The darkness seemed to be a living thing reaching out at them, and it _was_ a living thing, sort of, Hex realised. The Doctor had said this was the corpse of a TARDIS, an evil TARDIS. Hex shivered.   
  
It really was quite cold.  
  
He glanced over to the Doctor finally, and found the Time Lord’s face set and grim in the flickering light. Their steps didn’t echo as they should have. The fire didn’t crackled or pop. It was eerily silent, and bright slitted eyes stared out of the dark.  
  
Hex swallowed, or tried to. His throat was dry again, and he didn’t want to ask the Doctor for the purple drink to relieve it. He didn’t want to ask the Doctor for anything.   
  
The group stopped.  
  
Hex stumbled, the Doctor catching his shoulder to keep him from falling over. They were arrayed in front of a low rise, at the top of which stood a great carved rock. A stelae monument, the Doctor said.   
  
“We’ve arrived, I guess…” Hex muttered bitterly. He crossed his arms against the chill, his fists still clenched tight.  
  
One of the old priests stepped forward. He looked something close to ninety to Hex, though the Doctor had explained during their time in the hut that the elders of the small community were probably only in their mid-forties, fifties at the most. Life was just hard in this time and place.  
  
The old man was decked in white cotton decorated with parrot feathers. His ears were plugged with jade. He stood at the very base of the natural platform which the stone monument was mounted on.  
  
“There has been no rain,” the old man said. “No rain, and we starve, we thirst. The crops wilted. Infants fainted by their mothers’ withered breasts.”  
  
There was some nodding among the assembled.  
  
“We come to the depths of Xibalba, the place of fear. We come to implore the gods of wind and rain, to beg favour from the court of the dead. We implore Chaak for his bounty, but nothing comes. Many stop believing and leave. They head west for the mountains, but what will the peoples of the mountains say when they see them? Will they welcome our families and give them shelter? Can we take that risk?”  
  
Looking at the broken handful of people around him, Hex couldn’t help but think they could. They were all old, with the exception of the one-armed guard, and the disgruntled teenager.   
  
“We build temples to the sky!” said the priest. “And still the rain does not fall. We give offerings of our own blood, and I will offer again this day, but still, the rain does not fall!”  
  
Cutting down all of the trees and building giant fires didn’t help any, Hex thought cynically. Still, he felt sorry for these people. Who was he to judge them, when he’d grown up coddled and safe, never having to deal with the threat of famine or drought?  
  
That didn’t mean he liked them, but he couldn’t help hoping for them. It wasn’t fair what had happened here.  
  
The old priest pulled a long spine from out of a concealed pouch in his robe. It was shiny black and looked pointy enough to do some serious damage.  
  
“What is _that_?” Hex squeaked.  
  
“A stingray spine,” the Doctor said, coming up close behind him, and speaking lowly. “Traded in from the coast.”  
  
“And what is he planning on doing with it?”  
  
“A voluntary offering.”  
  
“You mean he’s going to stick himself?”  
  
“Something like that.”  
  
The priest bowed towards the stelae at the top of the slope before walking up to greet it, chanting all the while in high, urgent tone, asking the spirits of the underworld to look kindly upon him and his people. The chant was picked up by the rest of the party and the sound of it seemed to swirl around the dark and the dancing torches. Bright orange embers swayed on the twist of sound.  
  
“Oh, my god!” said Hex when the priest started to disrobe. “He’s not going to…”  
  
“I’m afraid so,” said the Doctor.  
  
“I think I’m going to be sick.”  
  
The priest collected the blood in a small dish he picked up out of the shadows, before using his fingers to sprinkle it on the rock.  
  
“Voluntary offering’s one thing,” said Hex. “But I am not, I repeat not, sticking myself _there_ with a… I don’t care. I’m not.”  
  
“You don’t have to, Hex,” the Doctor rumbled.  
  
“You aren’t either!” Hex added. “Because… because you aren’t.”  
  
“It’s all cultural, Hex, it doesn’t offend me.”  
  
“It doesn’t offend me either, it just looks bloody painful, and you aren’t! You aren’t because…” he paused. Because this was the wrong time, and the wrong place, and everyone was staring. Because he should have said something, done something, earlier, but he was too busy feeling sorry for himself and raging at the Doctor for things that weren’t his fault.  
  
“Because we watch each other's backs,” he finished lamely. “And if I let you stick yourself down there with a giant big spike, then I’m just as useless as I feel.”  
  
The Doctor took a deep breath. “It may not be necessary,” he said.  
  
“Good,” said Hex, trying to ignore how ominous the Doctor’s pronouncement was. He looked back at the old man and felt a grudging respect —  
  
No matter how useless Hex thought the action, you had to hand it to a guy who was willing to do _that_ to help his people. Next the old man knelt, taking out a small wrapped-skin bundle, and unrolling it to reveal thirteen glistening obsidian blades. They were small and thin, like razors, and nearly translucent when the priest held them up to the flames, one by one.  
  
“He’s not going to…” Hex said.   
  
“No,” said the Doctor. “This is a different kind of offering. Very difficult to make those blades I’d imagine. And thirteen.” He sort of hummed under his breath. “It is strange how different cultures come to the same conclusions. Though, I suppose there are only so many numbers to choose without stepping into the fourth dimension.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The Maya believed in thirteen levels of heaven — and hell —” the Doctor whispered. “all caught up together in the branches and roots of the Great Ceiba Tree that holds up the sky.”  
  
No one was staring at them now. All eyes were turned to the stelae. The priest put the last of the blades down before the monument, sprinkling his own blood to mark it. The cavern’s floor glowed; faintly at first, but stronger with each passing moment. A strong, moist wind ruffled Hex’s hair and threatened to blow his hat off. Then there was a gentle wheezing, the same sound that had woken him up that morning.  
  
“The TARDIS!”  
  
“No…” the Doctor said.  
  
The wheezing intermingled with growls, and the eyes which Hex had fancied he’d seen watching in the dark crept forward, bodies and faces forming around them. There were about three-score of the creatures. They resembled upright jungle cats, spotted like cheetahs. They had slight manes. Around their waists they wore short leather kilts with wicked knives hung at their belts.  
  
The growing light flashed against their fangs and extended claws. The great growl blended into a dark purr.  
  
The humans were out numbered six to one.  
  
“What’s going to happen now?” Hex asked.  
  
The Doctor didn’t answer. The wheezing, groaning sound of the universe grew louder, overwhelming the noises of the cats. The old priest staggered back from the alter, and, in the space he’d vacated, a shape started to take form.   
  
_tbc_


	12. Dust

Yet, as deeply rooted in our unconscious minds as shadowing is, even this may be overridden by other, more deeply rooted perceptual clues. Perhaps the most powerful of these is face recognition, present even in newborn infants.

Michael D. Coe, Art and Illusion among the Classical Maya

 

Hex blinked at the figure materializing on the platform. Blonde hair, slim body, dirty clothing. “Sandra?” he said in surprise.

“No,” said the Doctor. “Not Sandra.”

Hex wondered briefly if he’d forgot her name, but no, it was the girl from the field school. He hit the answer with a dull thud as his heart did a little somersault.

“She’s been possessed,” said the Doctor. “The TARDIS consciousness is inhabiting her.”

The cheetah people hissed, hemming them in closely. Hex felt fur and claws jostling him forward, his feet scraping over pebbles on the cave floor. Sandra was leering at him.

“Little Hex-y,” she said. “Or should I say Hector. Always hiding from yourself. I see you’ve come back. And what present have you brought for me?” Her eyes flashed to the Doctor. “A nice, juicy Time Lord for me to feast on! You are a good little boy, Hector. I think I’ll keep you as a pet once I’ve assimilated. I’m sure you’ll play nicely with my kitty cats. They are so playful.”

Hex felt foul breath in his ear. It smelled like rotting meat. He gagged slightly, tried to stand strong.

“I’ll fight you,” the Doctor was saying, standing with his fists clenched by his sides and all of his power and darkness turned forward. “I will not let you destroy this planet.”

Sandra giggled. “Little Time Lord, do you think you can stand against me? Your race is puny. All of your power comes from us, and you, Doctor, you aren’t even fully Gallifreyan. A scared little halfling. How would you stand up to me?”

“I defeated your master enough times,” the Doctor said. “You tell me.”

Sandra growled, and with her the cheetah people who were under her thrall. Hex was having trouble keeping an eye on the Doctor, so many of the monsters had surrounded him.

“Grab him!” Sandra shouted. One of the cheetah people stepped forward and did so, taking the Doctor’s arms cruelly from behind.

“You think you can pit your mind against mine?” she ranted. “Try this!”

There was no apparent change in Sandra’s demeanour, no rush of wind, or flashing lights. The Doctor, however, yelped and sagged into the monster’s grip, breathing hard.

“You… will… not… defeat me…” he said from between clenched teeth.

Hex watched, horrified, as the Doctor sagged further. The old Maya priest had apparently fainted, his people were divided between continuing their chants and looking terrified. And what could Hex do? He’d said he would watch their backs, and now the Doctor was pale and writhing in agony in the grips of that… that… thing, and Ace was dead, and what, what could he do?

“Oh, my god…” he said. “Oh, my god…”

That wasn’t bloody well helping. He looked around, but there was no escape. Any possible exit was blocked off by the cheetah people. Hex tried to tear his eyes away from them, from their savage teeth and claws, and what could those do to his soft, easily torn flesh? More were joining the ranks every minute. All with the same leather kilts and brutal skinning knives.

Except for one.

Hex’s eyes focused through the gloom. That one was wearing a familiar beige t-shirt. Sporting it. Like a trophy.

Hex's felt his heart rate slow. He was no longer terrified, no longer confused, lost, and guilt-wracked: he was enraged.

This was the confirmation of all he’d feared, and so what if he was going to die, he was going to die anyways; if the Doctor was right them the whole bloody world was going to die any second now and there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to stop it.

Hex ran forward, screaming. “You killed her! You monster! You killed her!”

His fists hammered into the creature’s strong chest, the ragged remains of Ace’s t-shirt falling apart under his blows, coarse, spotted fur protruding from the tears. The monster looked down at him quizzically, as if it was trying to place Hex’s face.

“I hate you! I hate you!”

The creature licked its lips. Its tongue was dark red and barbed. Hex involuntarily thought of his nan’s cat. Way back. Oh, god. The terror returned as he thought about it. Was this his life flashing before his eyes then? The monster was baring its fangs at him, smiling, oh, god, it was smiling like this was some kind of game. Like he was just a mouse.

He’d seen what his nan’s cat did to mice.

“Ohhh,” crooned Sandra up on the mound. “Little Doctor, you do have to see this. Your cat-girl is about to tear apart your little bat boy. Won’t that be fun?”

“Hex…” the Doctor choked out. “Hex, stop, please…”

“It killed her!” Hex shouted, the stinging tears leaking out of his eyes and blurring his vision. All of the emotions wound up and smashed until he didn't know what. “It killed her, Doctor! And I loved her.”

That was it, out in the open then. Too late.

He felt clawed hands griping into his back. This was it then. Hex resigned himself to his fate.

“I loved her,” he sobbed. Exhaustion trumped fear, horror, and hate and his futile blows stopped. Hex let his arms fall against the creature’s chest.

“It is her,” the Doctor said, barely audible over the growls and the chants. “It is her, the infection was dormant, but it would have defeated the snake venom. They may even have been controlling the reptile to that purpose. To bring down her defences… Hex, you need to bring her back, bring her —”

He stopped suddenly. His instructions replaced by a wordless scream as the Master’s TARDIS in Sandra’s body reasserted her control.

“Not fair!” she said. “You won’t get out of it that easily, Doctor. I will have your mind. I won’t be constrained to this fractured form, stealing bodies for eternity. Feeling their flesh rot, the stench of it. You will not stop me from taking your mind and your ship!”

Her edges were cracking as she spoke, white, burning light spilling from her mouth and eyes. The Doctor would have been on the floor if he hadn’t been held up. His eyes were pressed shut, his mouth contorted. There was a low whine, almost musical, filling the air that was a human voice an animalistic growl.

It sounded like a thousand violins turned up to their highest pitch. A million angry wasps. And it hurt.

And Hex was stuck with claws in his back, and the blood running down, and his cheek dug against the chest of the creature that couldn’t possibly be Ace. Couldn’t be, except that it had stopped mauling him, was pulling its claws out, and was looking at him with that quizzical look again.

And —

Hex was sobbing, his nose was thick with tears, but he could still smell her under the cat piss and blood: Gunpowder and bar nuts. Old leather and citrus shampoo. Time and space, and all of the things he had just told her, except that now it was far, far too late —

“Ace?” Hex asked in a small voice. Those predatory eyes bored into him. He couldn’t see Ace there. Not even a little bit. The Doctor’s screams were echoing in his ears, and he didn’t understand this at all. He didn't know what to do.

Ace was dead. She’d been bitten by a snake and died. She wasn’t this, this... thing. That didn’t make any sense.

Except, except…

“Ace, are you in there, at all?” The claws retreated completely, and Hex dropped to his knees at the creature’s feet. His head hummed from the blood loss, and the growls, roars, wasps, everything —

“Who is Ace?” the cat-monster asked. Its voice was rolling and wild and there was nothing, absolutely nothing of Ace in it.

“You are,” said Hex, hoping against hope that he was telling the truth.

“Am I?” the creature asked.

“You are,” said Hex.

“And what is an Ace to you?”

A thousand answers rolled through Hex’s mind:

A laughing, devil-may care woman out-running explosions and fate and time, saving the day and the world and him too, more often than not. He thought of the smell of nitro-9, and the first time he’d stepped into the TARDIS, and his best friend being converted into a Cyberman. His whole dull life and the veil that she’d lifted. The Doctor’s wise eyes. Ace. Dorothy. McShane. Danger, adventure, lov—

But he could never tell her that. Except he had already, hadn’t he? Never mind, it had always been clear she was taken. Always. First by the Doctor, and now by this monster. And it had been a dumb thought anyways.

“Friend,” Hex answered finally. “She’s my friend.”

Nothing more than that maybe, but that was so much in itself.

“Is the Doctor man your friend also?” the creature asked.

“And yours too,” said Hex, looking up into those wild golden eyes, willing them to understand. “Though, you two get into epic rows sometimes.”

The creature seemed to consider. “He is in pain.”

Hex flinched. He could still hear the screams, more whimpers now. He knew.

“What do you do when your friends are in pain?”

“You help them,” said Hex. “Because we watch each others’ backs, always. That’s what the three of us do. The Doctor, Ace, and Hex tagging along at the end, the three of us saving the universe together. But first we’ve got to save him. Please. Ace. If you’re still in there at all. There’s nothing in the universe that’s more important to you than him. Nothing and no one.”

The cat growled low in its throat, and Hex closed his eyes, thinking that it had been all for nothing. That there was nothing of Ace left, if there even had been to start, and now he was about to get torn apart for his trouble.

Instead he heard a wild voice rise up and echo throughout the cave. Deadly, untamed, and dripping with bloodlust:

“Brothers! Sisters! We have a new hunt.”

Hex felt a rush of air as the creature jumped over him. He heard the cheetah peoples’ growls and roars crescendo, overpowering the hum. He open his eyes slowly, uncurled his arms from over his head. The cheetah people were converging on the alter and the false goddess Sandra. She was shouting, trying to ward them off, but she’d nearly lost all form:

Each claw strike, each bite, released more of the blinding light. She was ripping apart. The air seemed to crackle. Lighting jumped from the alter to the roof in a blazing pillar of fire. It was very warm suddenly. Very, very warm. Hex felt a deep terror twisting his gut. The instinctual need to run. The people who had brought him here evidently felt it too, because even the most steadfast of the chanters had abandoned their posts and were rushing for the surface. The teenager Ak was carrying the unconscious old priest, stumbling, looking back over his shoulder at Hex and the Doctor.

And running away.

Hex wished them well. Hoped they would escape to a better life. Somewhere.

The cave floor seemed to pulsate. Hex struggled to stay balanced as he rose to his feet, staggered to where the Doctor was picking himself up. They met, falling against each other, unsteady on their feet, wounded, floundering.

“We need to run,” the Doctor said, shouting over the roars and the wasps and the burning. “The TARDIS consciousness is breaking apart under the strain. She’s trying to rejoin with her shell, but the dimensions are off. She’s going to collapse the whole cavern!”

“And the Earth?” Hex panted.

“Safer than we are,” said the Doctor. “We need to run.”

“But Ace!” said Hex.

The Doctor’s pale, broken face pinched. “She’s already lost. The transformation’s been completed. The influence was too strong for her in the end. I’m sorry. It was always a fear of mine, but… Hex, we need to go.”

“I won’t leave her!”

“If there was any hope, Hex, any at all…” The Doctor held out his arms, pleading, their eyes fixed. He looked so completely helpless and lost, but his voice was still too calm, too matter-of-fact, too bloody accepting.

“You’re wrong!” Hex shouted in his face. “I don’t care! You’re wrong!” He turned to look at the mob of cheetah people, tried to sort out which was which and find the one in the multitude that he knew and loved. He couldn’t see her. There were too many.

“Hex!” the Doctor said sharply.

Hex didn’t turn to face him. He knew the Doctor was right, but how could they just give up? How could he be so alien? Ace would lay down her life for him, and he was just going to walk away and abandon her. Rocks were falling from the ceiling, and dust, choking, and thick, making it hard to breath.

“Ace!” Hex said, coughing. “Come back to us!”

Then one of the rocks hit him, and he knew no more.

*

The Doctor stared at Hex’s crumpled form, despair filling him. He was too weak from Sandra’s mental attack. He could barely hold himself on his feet, let alone carry Hex. But he had to.

The cave was well and truly collapsing now, and he wasn’t sure if there’d be enough time to get to the surface if they'd both been Olympic sprinters in their prime. Not like this. The Doctor looked inward, drawing on every piece of strength left to him, every thin thread that hadn’t been stripped away and unravelled by the demented TARDIS’s invasion of his mind.

He fell to his knees, fighting to conserve the energy he was going to need. He looped his arms around Hex and prepared to hoist the fallen nurse over his shoulder. He’d lost one friend already, he refused to lose another. He summoned his strength, his centre, trying to remember the word’s of a wise old monk he’d studied under lifetimes ago.

Anything is possible, Doctor… His knees shook under the added weight. More debris was falling. The Doctor shuffled, trying to avoid the deadly point of a stalactite falling from the roof. He wasn’t fast enough, it was going to hit, pierce him, crush his burden. He was too weak to avoid it. Too torn to slow time and step away —

Only, at the last moment, he was bowled over and out of the path of death. Hex’s body was wrenched away by a stronger pair of arms. The Doctor looked up into the feral, blood-spattered features of one of the cheetah people.

“Watching your back,” the cat hissed. She scooped Hex up easily under one arm, and then proceeded to do the same with the Doctor.

She ran.

*

It was all confusion inside Ace’s mind. She was running, fast as the wind. Faster. And that felt good. Her paws gripped rock underfoot even as it crumbled away. The blood rushing in her veins. The smell of blood of the wind. The taste of blood in her mouth.

She howled. And that also felt good.

She had two puny creatures tucked under her arms, and she couldn’t remember why. Were they prey? Would she feast on their flesh? No, no… that wasn’t right.

Kittens, she decided. They were her kittens and she had to keep them safe. This collapsing cave was no place for them. It would crush their puny kitten bodies. They had no fangs or claws to defend themselves against the falling rocks.

She ran. Fast. Fast. Out of the dark and into the jungle. Her native home. She could smell her markings against the trees. See where she had scratched the trees, fresh bark peeled back to reveal raw pith, dark, oozing sap. The thick scent of smoke and green. Yes! This was her home.

She howled again, piercing the hot air as the cave fell behind her, the earth vibrating and bucking with the force of the implosion. Dust rose up to block the sun. Dry in her nostrils. She felt sorrow twist in her gut: her brothers and sisters of the hunt had been in that cave. Gone now.

Ah well, that was the law of the jungle.

She dropped her burden. The kittens rolled slightly on impact, picking up a coating of dried leaves and more dust. One of them was asleep. How strange. She bent to lick him where he was bleeding.

“Ace?” the awake one said.

She stopped, looked at him. She’d heard that word before ‘Ace’. It was very familiar. And she’d seen this kitten before too, in the cave, it was him her brothers and sisters in the hunt had died to save.

He was important, the sleeping kitten had said. The most important. Looking at the puny man, dirty, and pale, and unable to even stand without shaking, the cat wondered how he could possibly be important.

“You’re falling back, Ace,” the little man said. “You’re regressing. But you’ve beaten this before, Ace…”

Ace, he kept saying that word. It was so strange. She fought to understand. That was the only way to understand anything. You had to fight.

“You need to stop fighting,” the man said. “You need to relax and come back into yourself, Ace. The more you fight the further you’ll fall.”

His words didn’t make any sense.

“What else is there?” she asked. “I want to run, and feel the earth under my paws, and smell the blood on the wind, and taste —”

“And taste your enemy’s blood in your mouth?” the man questioned. “Is that really what you want?”

“What else is there?” she asked.

“Tea, for one thing. A much better drink than blood any day. Chocolate pudding, Doris’s curry, fish and chips, warm bread and butter. Isn’t that better than senseless violence? Than raw meat and vengeance?”

“Meat is best when it is still warm,” she said, smelling the little kitten-man. He smelled old, wizened. How could he be a kitten and old? It did not make sense.

She could hear his heart beating. Hearts? It was a taunt to hear that pulse and its double beat. So much blood flowing through those veins, crackling with experience, the flavour of a thousand different worlds…

“I knew a girl once,” the man said, refusing to take his eyes from hers, to back down or be intimidated by her fangs. “A young girl, scared and far from home. She was always fighting. She was full of anger at the world, and maybe she had a right to be.”

“The world is not kind,” said the cat.

“No, it isn’t,” the man agreed. “And this girl knew that better than most. But she grew up, she grew up into a woman, a beautiful woman, and as she grew she learned how to centre herself, how to only let that fight out when it needed to come out. She learned control.”

“You made her learn,” the cat accused. “You forced her into the mud and made her cry. You showed her blood and tears and worlds burning.”

“I taught her some hard lessons, yes.”

“And you had awful rows.”

“We still do.”

The cat growled deep in her throat. She thought only of fighting, of grappling on the ground, pushing her muscles hard, and feeling so, so painfully, wonderfully alive. There was a girl in her mind, in some foggy memory, screaming.

The cat shook her head, scattering the dust from her mane. “But there were good things as well?” she asked.

He was quiet for a moment, as if considering. Looking at her. Pitying her, the memory-girl screamed, raged. Cried.

“There are worlds we’ve been to where the skies are burning,” he said slowly. “Places where the seas sleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song…” He stopped.

“I never meant to hurt you, Ace,” he said, so quietly it might have just been the dust settling on the loam.

She’d never know whether or not he’d said it, but she knew it was true. Had always known. It wasn’t his fault that his head was so full. That he had all the universe on his shoulders. He was Time’s Champion, the on-coming storm, the great crusader, the barricade against the dark. He always had work to do.

He couldn’t bend the rules or take time to the side, not even for her. Not when she was so desperate to rip out his throat and taste warm, fresh blood running down her chin, clotting in her fur, and tearing with her claws, bones snapping, and —

But he wanted to. He needed to. He was trying to.

So could she.

“Doctor?” the cat asked slowly, fangs and fur retreating.

“Yes, Ace?”

“My head is killing me.”

 

to be concluded


	13. Epilogue

Epilogue

 

since feeling is first  
who pays any attention  
to the syntax of things  
will never wholly kiss you;  
wholly to be a fool  
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,  
and kisses are a better fate  
than wisdom  
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry  
–the best gesture of my brain is less than  
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then  
laugh, leaning back in my arms  
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E.E. Cummings, since feeling is first

 

 

The TARDIS, their TARDIS, homely and blue and wise, she came to them. Slipping through the cracks, the Doctor said, with some long techno-babble explanation that only made Ace’s already sore head throb.

And so, the prophesy he’d made out on the tablet came true. They’d gone inside and tended to their wounds. Ace had found new clothes as the Doctor treated Hex in the med-lab, or rather, old clothes. She put on her battered leather bomber — she hadn’t worn it in years. But she needed it now. A shield against the world.

She wandered the corridors for a bit, searching for herself. Somehow she ended up leaning against the console room wall, still uncertain of her own body, her own mind. The roundels pressing into her back gave her some reassurance that she was still human, but the temptation to change was strong. She knew that it would fade, eventually, but it would always be there beneath the surface, making her skin itch from the inside.

She was scared that one day the urge to scratch would become too strong. That she’d claw her own face off and that would be it. There would be no turning back.

The Doctor was circling the central console, tapping it occasionally, and mumbling under his breath as the time rotor lazily bobbed up and down. He’d explained to her and Hex about the Master’s TARDIS, and how the strain of fighting his mind and the cheetah people had been too much for it. How the body it had possessed — a young undergrad named Cassandra Chanmbers — had been ripped apart by stresses that human biology had never been meant to contain.

He made it seem like that had been his clever scheme all along, but Ace didn’t buy it for a moment. He’d never have consented to that kind of senseless death if there had been any other way. At least, she hoped so. Sometimes she wondered —

She’d been travelling with him too long, Ace knew. She longed for the good old days when he’d been infallible, if a bit manipulative, before she’d realised that, when all was said and done, her Professor was usually as much in the dark as anybody; he just had better bluffs to cover his mistakes. Still, he was alien, and sometimes it felt like the more she knew him the less she really did.

He had powers that Ace still didn’t understand, and hoped that she never would. It was easy enough to let her eyes and her mind to slide past that. To see him as he presented himself, as her daft old professor swinging his brolly, instead of as he who, what, he actually was. It was less painful for both of them that way.

He looked at her over the console. His face was still pinched, his eyes dark from exhaustion. She could see her own inner battle reflected there, as he tried to look at her as Ace and not as the Cat. She knew that he could see it inside her, a blemish on her soul.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said suddenly.

Afraid that he might take this incident as an excuse; say something about how she’d be less tempted to turn back in Perivale, how there would be less danger. After all, fighting the evils of the universe was hardy conducive to being all Zen, and finding your centre, and keeping calm lest the thing inside you crawl out and scratch everyone’s eyes out.

The Doctor was hard for a moment. Ace could smell his tension. He was thinking about her. She knew it.

“Ace,” he said quietly, and in that voice. Her stomach dropped down to chat with her socks as she realised that she’d read him better than she’d thought. He was going to do it. He was going to kick her out.

Her mouth was too dry to swallow. Her fingers were cold.

Where would she go? What would she do? She didn't know any other way to live.

“Ace. Ace…” he said softly. His hands made little butterfly movements over the console without touching any of the controls. He wasn’t looking at her anymore and that was deliberate.

“I’ll be good Professor. I’ll stay in the TARDIS when there’s danger and bake cupcakes or whatever I have to do. Just don’t make me go.”

“Ace, I’m not going to make you leave,” the Doctor said. And she stopped her pleas and looked at him. He examined the backs of his hands for a long while. She watched him, followed his vision, as she had for so long. He had stubby but well kept fingernails. His hands were slightly podgy across the knuckles, firm and fleshy. Small, but stronger than they looked.

Those hands could move mountains. She’d seen it.

“You’ve been on this ship almost two decades,” he said, finally looking at her again.

Gordon Bennett, had it really been that long? With all the days and minutes and adventures. She wasn’t a teenager anymore. She was frighteningly close to middle age and when exactly had that happened? She tried to think of the last time she’d seen herself in a mirror. She didn’t look that old. She knew she didn’t.

“This is your home, Ace,” the Doctor said. “Until you decide to settle somewhere else." He paused, as if debating with himself.

"When that day comes, I will not stop you," he said, "but, until that day, until you reach your own decision, I will never force you to leave. Not even if I think it’s for the best.”

He looked at his hands again, palms now, lines that twisted and wove strange patterns of fate, even if they looked ordinary and human on the surface. His voice went quieter:

“I made that mistake once before, Ace, with another young woman who I loved dearly. And I was wrong.”

“You think it would be for the best, though?” said Ace. She felt the hysteria she’d had at the thought of being forced out morph into anger. “You aren’t going to force me to leave now, you’re just going to mind trick me later when I’ve got my defences down. I know how you work, Professor.”

“I’d never do that to you, Ace,” he said, looking away from his hands and those stories, back at the controls.

“But you think I should leave.”

“No, but I think you’re ready to leave. Ready to face the world out there. But only if you want to. All of these years, Ace. You’re wasting your life with me.”

“You call this wasting?” she asked. “I’d be dead a thousand times over if it weren’t for you. I’d be stuck back on Ice World serving smoothies to some stuck up tourist brats, and eventually I might’ve even accepted that. Just been happy being nothing and no one.”

“I’m just a sad old man,” said the Doctor, like he hadn’t even heard her. “I wonder every time we step out those doors if you’ll come back with me, if this won’t be the time I get you killed, and I feel so selfish. Ace…”

This was a confession Ace realised. He’d done this before, a few times, and it was always so wrong. Because he wasn’t supposed to apologize for his schemes and his plans; not when everything turned out in the end. He was only supposed to give his motives; not ask for forgiveness.

He didn't need to ask. She knew how to give it to him, always, even when he didn't deserve it. That was her job.

“You’re wrong,” Ace said, setting herself against him and all of those mysterious alien powers that he kept hidden behind his veiled grey eyes. “You’re wrong. Because I don’t care if there’s a thousand deaths waiting outside that door. Because you were right about one thing: This is my home. It’s more my home than Perivale ever was. And it’s going to be my home for a long time yet, because you clearly haven’t figured out how to look after yourself yet.”

“I need my Ace in the hole,” the Doctor admitted wryly, smiling at her. But his eyes were still guarded, and Ace wondered how much longer they could last like this. Running from the inevitable.

It was at that moment Hex appeared, tottering into the console room with his head wrapped in a comical white bandage.

“Could you keep your fighting down a bit?” he said. “Some of us have concussions.” He looked at Ace, shuffled uneasily. “It’s good to see you back,” he said, his eyes on the floor.

“It’s good to be back,” Ace said. She paused, watching him. He was afraid. Of her? Of what had happened? They’d nearly killed each other out there. “About what you said, when I was —”

“It was nothing,” Hex stammered. “Heat of the moment is all.”

Ace nodded. Right, yes, heat of the moment. It was probably best to keep it like that. To keep trading these stale lies back and forth. It was less painful for all of them that way.

Why had she always been so afraid of truth?

Ace forced a smile at Hex, at the Doctor. “So, what exciting misadventure are we off to next?” she asked.

“The Eye of Orion for a rest,” said the Doctor.

Ace rolled her eyes, the forced smile becoming natural. The old jokes crowded for space at the tip of her tongue. The mythical ‘Eye of Orion’ hadn’t been reached in all her years of TARDIS travel. She was near as sure the Professor was making the place up. She said as much to Hex, punching the staff nurse lightly, reasserting normality. Reasserting life.

“But first,” the Doctor said. “I need to run a few errands.”

 

*

Mauss was still staring out at the jungle when the universe waved at him again, booming and grinding, flashing and blue. The Doctor’s strange box materialized in front of him where Sandra had stood a moment ago. Mauss could hear his students and staff back at the vans shuffling and trying to figure out the bizarre series of spectacles.

The box’s doors peeked open and the Doctor stepped out, swinging his brolly.

“Hello again, Mauss. I was just swinging by this way en route to the Eye of Orion, and I happened to see some people standing along the cosmic motorway, and I’ve always had a soft spot for hitch-hikers."

Mauss’ mouth dropped open as Lodge backed slowly out of the box. Her head swung around and she caught sight of Herbert by the vans. She ran to her fiance’s arms, tackling him into a bear hug, and holding on like she’d never, ever let go.

She was followed by Brendan, his eyes swimming behind his scratched up glasses. His shirt was torn and stained. He stood for a long while just outside the box, blinking and speechless.

“I found him wandering around the jungle near the site,” said the Doctor. “He’d fallen into a sinkhole and only just managed to pull himself out yesterday. Treacherous things sinkholes. He was lucky there was an underground stream to keep him going, but you might want to have him checked out for giardia, amoebas, parasites — you never can trust the water in these tropical climates.”

Mauss nodded dumbly. There was his lost student. There was Lodge. He looked at the Doctor, at the doors of the magical box. Why was the Doctor frowning now.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The words cut Mauss like a knife. I’m sorry. That’s what the other doctor had told him after he’d woken up from the blast, all those years ago, I’m sorry. Nothing good ever followed those words.

“I found Lodge in the darkness, barely. Your friend had already been absorbed.”

“That’s not fair,” said Mauss.

“No, it isn’t,” the Doctor said, looking at the sky. He seemed to be searching for something there, an explanation maybe. Mauss had already looked. He knew that there weren’t any.

“I’ve put some money into his bank account though,” said the Doctor, bring his gaze down again finally. “And yours. It should be enough to pay off his mortgage on the farm, and to support his family for many, many years to come. I’ve put in a good word for you with some of the higher-ups as well. I know a great many people on this planet, not in this era perhaps, but my word still pulls weight in certain circles. You won’t be dismissed from your post at the university, and you will be able to continue your school here if you so choose. I can’t promise that the media won’t bother you for while, but I’ve done what I can to dissuade them.”

Mauss blinked. He wasn’t sure if he should be getting emotional or not. Not, he decided. He didn’t believe or understand half of what this strange little man was saying, but it made some kind of deep sense. There was a coarse, red ball of rage festering in his chest, but Mauss choked it down. Kept it hidden. It wasn't meant for the strange little man, only for death itself, and things that could have been. For time.

“Thank you,” Mauss said. He paused, swallowing. “Sandra?”

“Lost.” The Doctor’s eyes darkened. Swirling galaxies, Mauss thought, burning, overturned transports. “It wasn’t your fault,” the Doctor said.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Mauss. “It’s my burden to carry, not yours.” He took a deep breath and spoke his mind:

“Now, would you please leave and never come back?”

“I would,” said the Doctor, tipping his hat. “It was nice to meet you Geoffrey Mauss.”

The strange man stepped back into his box. A moment later it vanished, accompanied by its trademark grinding wheeze and the hoot of angry monkeys. In the distance, the rain began to fall, soft and cleaning.

Mauss turned and walked towards the future.

 

end


End file.
